Posts by Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure

SAP system gives UK tax collector a £750B headache as clock ticks on support

Why doesn't the Reg put in a freedom of information request to ask for a copy of the notice of tender letter inviting companies to bid for this work, and also asking how many companies put in bids.

Nokia scores a $3.5bn deal to inflict 5G on T-Mobile customers

Re: What?

The US T-Mobile is wholly-owned by the European T-Mobile which is a German company whose HQ is in Bonn.

India added 240m phones/year build capacity in just one year

Re: the mind boggles

The question is, how many of those phones are smartphones, and how many are not?

Microsoft flips Google the bird after Windows kernel bug blurt

Re: Does Google feel threatened perhaps?

It is interesting that you should post this just when Google's quarterly revenue/sales overtook Microsoft's for the first time in history. In the most recent reported quarter, Google grew by 20% to $22bn and Microsoft grew by less than 1% to $20bn. It looks as if Microsoft may have stopped growing for the time being, whereas Google, is still growing at double digit rates.

I think it is Microsoft that feel threatened.

We're not in Kansas City anymore, Toto ... Google axes free fiber internet

Re: And so it goes...

Windows 10, anyone?

But at least Windows 10 respects your privacy.

BlackBerry boss mulls mid-range Androids

Re: What Does That Leave?

Their mobile device management capability emphasising security but now applied to other mobile operating system i.e. Android, iOS (via Apple APIs) and Windows Phone in that order due to:

Android selling 325m phones ( 81% of global market) in 4Q 2015

Apple selling 72m phones (18% of global market) in 4Q 2015

MS selling 4m phones (1% of global market) in 4Q 2015

Blackberry sold 1m phones (0.2% of global market) in 4Q 2015

(http://www.mobile-phone-transfer.com/android-transfer.html)

I expect Microsoft to buy Blackberry shortly because it would be annoying to Microsoft for enterprise customers to start buying Android phones with a Blackberry "security layer", however implausible the actual security product might be - it's all about the brand.

Still, it will be much cheaper to destroy Blackberry than Nokia, because the price is much lower due to BB already self-immolating.

Tech biz bosses tell El Reg a Brexit will lead to a UK Techxit

Re: Freedom of movement.

And Boris, Osborne and Gove duking it out for the PM role (though likely in practice to be the Leader of the Opposition role). My money's on Gove...(in Euros)

Stop! Before you accept that Windows 10 Mobile upgrade, read this

Re: Hmmm...

DuckGoGo? Surely you mean Bing...

Hey Windows 10, weren't you supposed to help PC sales?

Re: The Purpose of 10

Asparagus? Armadillos? Amadeus?

Uncle Sam's boffins stumble upon battery storage holy grail

Re: @uncle sjohie

My local Sainsbury has about 15 charging points.

Also, as soon as they start providing contactless charging bays at Sainsbury, your self-driving car will be able to go out on its own, during the day, foraging for nearby electricity whenever it gets hungry.

And then when they achieve Artificial Intelligence as a result of the Darwinian stresses of driving in south-west London, they can socialise there, too - and the marketing people can start to exploit them by offering different types of higher status electricity - "Mine's a tall, green, skinny lattetricty..."

Microsoft axes ‘dozens’ more from former Nokia phone biz

Re: I still don't know why

It is more like "the painful realisation that a significant number of senior executives in tech companies are embarrassingly inadequate when it come to delivering either innovation or decent customer service so they want to distract shareholders and the general public from this humiliating truth" hence M&As aplenty.

Microsoft on Cloud 9 after online biz boosts profits to $6.3bn in second quarter

GAAP is the better measure, non-GAAP typically spins the figures to look better

Surely a journalist should quote GAAP rather than non-GAAP.

If you insist on using the misleading non-GAAP figure, at least quote the GAAP figure as well.

Sneaky Microsoft renamed its data slurper before sticking it back in Windows 10

Re: FTFY

Microsoft employee 1 writes:

"I know I'll probably get loads of downvotes for even asking this but has anyone actually checked whether any of this information actually does get sent anywhere if you don't sign up to the 'Let us see everything you're doing programme' or as Microsoft call it the 'Customer Experience Improvement Program' ?"

And Microsoft employee 2 immediately replies (a coincidence, perhaps?):

"Whilst I'm not defending them for collecting it, I think it's pretty refreshing to see that a company can be open about what they do collect. So many hide it, or try to."

Dear MSE 1 - perhaps Microsoft will check for you and discover "Lo, none of it gets sent anywhere"

Dear MSE 2 - "refreshing" is a lovely word to describe data piracy, perhaps you should ask FAST to investigate on your behalf.

PC sales will rise again, predicts Intel, but tablets are toast

Presumably by serious work, you mean word processing?

Flickering screens turn Microsoft Surface Books into Microsoft Surface paperweights

Presumably those were "Bing" searches that found no fault with Microsoft's Surface Book

as your post smells of Microsoft's handiwork...

SatNad failure as Lumia income drops over 50% at Microsoft

Re: Windows 10

I think you can, actually...

Sysadmins can forget PC management skills, says Microsoft

Re: Cloud training and certification?

A quarter of Bangladesh is less than seven feet above sea level so I would be surprised if there were too many Cloud grade data centres there...

Ditching political Elop makes for a more Nadella Microsoft

Re: A little ridiculous

the UK election?...where are you from? the USA?

This is rather cheeky but here is a story from somewhere else...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2415589/microsoft-might-dump-windows-phone-in-favour-of-android

I find it quite plausible, as Nadella is not wedded to the past, and has shown signs of wanting to takeover Android but then use it as a trojan horse for making Microsoft services compulsory on their Android phones.

Windows 10 Edge: Standards kinda suck yet better than Chrome?

Re: still riddled with Flash badness though

But I think the BBC is following its users in this case, not leading them...

Remake, remodel: Toshiba Chromebook 2

Re: Your wish is granted.

Perhaps the guy that used to run the Scroogled campaign at Micrososft - I believe Microsoft recently "let him go", so he may be at a loose end now...

MOUNTAIN of unsold retail PCs piling up in Blighty: Situation 'serious'

Good point

and I wonder if it is because all the modern equivalents of Lotus123 are Internet things like Facebook, Whatsapp, YouTube which are designed not to make many demands on the local PC because they want to reach as many people as possible, even if their PCs are somewhat antiquated. All the hard work is done in the Cloud, so the PC ends up being a bit like a tv being broadcast to.

Hence the lack of need for an upgrade every two years.

Microsoft picks up shotgun, walks 'Modern apps' behind the shed

Re: Windows RT users – both of you

What RT?

Here's what the Verge said about RT...

http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/3/7974759/windows-rt-is-dead

It is clear from this article that at one time there were at least 3 users

HMRC ditches Microsoft for Google, sends data offshore

Re: Great idea...

Microsoft is a much bigger tax avoider than Google and have been doing it much longer. I suspect this may be the one instance where Google copied Microsoft...

Burger me! Microsoft's chainsaw rampage through sacred cow herd

On the 6th of March 2011 Motorola Atrix phone was released

The Motorola Atrix had a laptop-style dumb docking station which provided simply a mouse, keyboard and screen which connected to the phone's full-fat desktop operating system, giving a PC run by a smartphone.

It was somewhat underpowered (2011 smartphone CPU, of course), so didn't take the world by storm, but the subsequent Atrix 2 ran adequately well, as did the Motorola Photon smartphone released a little while later.

As it is April 2015 now, the article is about 4 years out of date really, though I have been waiting for Apple to do their magic and make a consumer-delighting equivallent to the Atrix 2, and make a lot of money. Though they may have an agreement with Microsoft that forbids them doing this...

But it will come, sooner or later, though when it does, it will be very bad news for Microsoft.

Some of the other commenters seem to be unaware of this precedent.

Microsoft's cash-leaking Nokia phones rip off patents, face import ban

RyokuMas

I have seen your posts before and I have formed the view you are a Microsoft employee who is paid to put these kind of comments as near to the top as possible.

Can you list me maybe half a dozen of your apps on each of the two ecosystems you mention, please? or even 1 of each.

Thank you.

PC sales dip below 2009 levels, with Japanese sales off 44 per cent

I recollect that in the peak PC year of 2011...

...there was a three month period when 90 million PCs were sold.

68 million sounds rather sad by comparison.

With PC margins so thin, I guess Microsoft may be having to hold the price of Windows down to stimulate sales. And Dell clearly did something to annoy Microsoft - perhaps it shouldn't have made those chromebooks so desirable. Is Dell the new Compaq, shortly to be gobbled up by Lenovo, I wonder?

I recollect that in the peak PC year of 2011...

....90 million PC were sold in a single quarter.

So the current 68 million looks somewhat pathetic.

And it sounds like the margins for PC makers are so thin, that Microsoft may well be unable to charge them so much for Windows.

And Dell clearly did something to annoy Microsoft - perhaps it was making those chromebooks that MS couldn't forgive. Is Dell the new Compaq, soon to be eaten by Lenovo, I wonder?

Microsoft's Windows 10 build list snowballs for Lumia mobes

Re: Since when did the old Nokia Lumias suddenly get named just Lumia.

The magnificent 5 re-appear

It did come out very quickly, so I guess you are right - still Vista under the hood.

Who are these 5 down voters? Surely it is obligatory as a Reg reader to have a sense of humour?

I can only assume these 5 must be trolls of some description

WinPhone? PAH! If you want Microsoft's mobe apps, grab an Android

Irony for those of us with long memories

DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run....

Take control of the Android manufacturers and...

Google Chrome suffers brain freeze on Android Ice Cream Sandwich

Re: And what do you *lose* moving off ICS ?

I think you will find that Lenovo now own Motorola, so big G no longer responsible for hardware

IDC downgrades sales outlook for PCs AND tablets

And the 2015 figure for Windows PCs is even lower

because the IDC 293m for 2015 includes 20m Apple Macs, so the Windows PC figure for 2015 will be 273m. That is down from 350m in 2011. How are the mighty fallen...

Windows tablet price war FINALLY has 'em prying open wallets

Re: Storming a Dying Market

Windows PCs are actually down marginally, the growth in PC form factor numbers is because Apple Mac sales are increasing.

Full version of Windows includes unbelievably tiresome updates, and the option to receive viruses and zero day attacks whenever you like...it sounds like you haven't tried a chrome book for any length of time, you seem to have swallowed Microsoft's FUD propaganda wholesale without checking for yourself.

Horrifying iPhone sales bring Apple $18bn profit A QUARTER

Re: So what happen to Peak Apple?

and in the mirror, lo and behold, a Microsoft employee...

Lenovo posts an INCREASE in desktop PC and notebook sales

Re: Would be even better

Get real? Perhaps you meant "Get a chromebook"...

...says someone with recent experience of trying to help a friend with a Windows 8.1 PC whose wireless printer prints effortlessly from his wife's Apple Mac but refuses to even display the printer in the TIFKAM email client he was trained to use by the shop that sold him the PC. Twice re-installed the printer driver, same result. But having sampled MS forums about people with very similar problems being given more and more sweeping remedies that fail to work but would leave the PC in a worse state than before, I was not brave enough even to go back to the previous restore point...

But if you are a Microsoft employee posting, as I suspect you may be, please disregard this, and I apologise for my discourtesy.

Google Glassholes are undateable – HP exec

Re: Pretty arrogant

They are working on a contact lens equivalent, but the engineering difficulties are such that it is likely to be 5 years out from now before it works.

Thought PCs were in the toilet? They're STILL eating Apple's lunch

Legacy Windows Desktop PC under threat

At work we dock our Windows laptops into a docking station to get a decent mouse, keyboard and screen, and a power supply for the short-lived battery, on health and safety grounds.

However, I could do the same with my smartphone instead, and throw away my laptop.

In the short term I would use a Citrix session delivered to the attached screen to get the legacy Windows applications. In the longer term, I could run a full size browser to access the Cloud applications that will gradually replace them.

Then I can carry my 4oz PC in my pocket and use it as a smartphone when away from my desk, but use it as my mouse, keyboard and screen "PC" when docked at my desk to run my desktop applications on a large screen.

Most line of business apps will run happily through a browser today anyway, even though they are not yet Cloud-based. As as applications migrate to the Cloud, this will make the phone plus docking station plus browser the standard way to access all desktop applications that need mouse keyboard and screen. So the Windows desktop market does have a big threat hanging over it, and contrary to your rather old fashioned view, it may start a rapid decline within the next 36 months.

Peak Windows PC sales were 2011 when they averaged 90 million a quarter.

The quarterly PC sales mentioned in the article were 74 million, but 4 million of those were Apple Macs, and some were Chromebooks, so the Windows PC sales would be around 69 million.

Quite a drop from 90 million I would say. And that is before the effect that I am talking about starts to kick in.

That AMAZING Windows comeback: Wow – 0.5% growth in 2015

You sound so much like a Microsoft employee that I am going to disregard your comment

There! I bet that hurt...

Toshiba's CB30-102 13.3in Chromebook – imagine a tablet with a keyboard

Re: @Stuart 22

I have one and it Chromecasts beautifully...and also, surprisingly to me, Chromecast also works from my daughter's Netflix on her iPhone directly to our HD tv.

Hotmail-gate: Windows 8 code leaker pleads guilty to theft of trade secrets

I seem to remember Microsoft doing something similar with

Seattle Computer Products QDOS which Microsoft sold on without permission to IBM as "MSDOS".

Peter, was that theft also?

Microsoft coughed up $1,000,000 for that when the law caught up with them 2 years later...but they poached the employee from SCP who had actually written QDOS so that makes it OK, doesn't it?

Microsoft buries Sinofsky Era... then jumps on the coffin lid

Re: Back in the real world

You are terribly out of date - the top laptop bestseller on Amazon has been a Chromebook for the last 8 months. And over Christmas, the top two best sellers were Chromebooks. You may say these are consumer purchases so they don't count. But alas, the NPD data for the first 11 months of 2013 about commercial and government laptop sales in the USA indicates that Chromebooks have 20% of that segment, too, and by inference 10% of the commercial/govt PC market in the USA.

I cannot help thinking you may be yet another minion of the dark lord, Steve Baldemort...who always seem to come out in droves when Chromebooks are mentioned. Why would that be, I wonder?

Samsung is officially the WORLD'S BIGGEST smartphone maker

Simple Maths

Samsung 31%

All other makers combined then must be 100%-31% = 69%

I expect you meant to say: "all the other major smartphone manufacturers".

There is a long tail of "others" that add up to a large number of phones.

BSkyB punters drown in MASSIVE MYSTERY Yahoo! mail! migration!

Re: I guess they should read some of the deleted emails

I read this post with increasing amusement until I reached the final sentence: "So I'm not sure what isn't clear in there about the switch." which I thought was being said in a deliciously ironic tone.

Unfortunately, I then realised no irony was intended, and that it was a serious post from someone who presumably works for Sky.

Ouch!

Those instructions are long and complicated, suitable for someone with an IT background but not for the average person in the street. Classic case of instructions being written by technical staff with no thought for the diversity of the audience they may be addressing. Written, in fact, as one technical person would write to another technical person.

I don't know Sky's demographic profile, but I assume someone in the organisation does, so perhaps they should have used this information in formulating an appropriate set of communications.

The fact that the article suggests that the forums are in meltdown means that people would probably not be able to find suitable assistance from the help page in this instance.

Samsung's new co-CEO: 'Windows isn't selling very well'

Re: It's not that Windows is not selling well

On the language point, there are 5 million native Finish speakers, and 360 million native English speakers plus a further 1.125 billion with English as their second language or spoken as a foreign language.

To be a global business from Finland, it is useful to adopt English - 5 million v roughly 1.5 billion.

Windows Phone 8 hasn't slowed Microsoft's mobile freefall

Re: This is US only, not at all representative of worldwide (also means that Apple aren't #1)

I agree with most of your comment which is almost entirely valid, but one Nokia trick you have missed is that Nokia just re-designated their very cheap Asha feature phone as a smart phone. Gartner, IDC etc have never considered the Asha a smart phone and still don't, but Nokia are suddenly now saying it is.

So the number of Nokia smartphones miraculously rockets, and it is easy for people then to make the false assumption that Windows Phone is the cause of the rocketing sales.

Microsoft says Google trying to undermine Windows Phone

Re: Google's Evil ?

In my opinion, this is a disingenuous attempt, presumably by a Microsoft PR company, to give the impression that secure boot is not an anti-competitive practice. Whereas I believe it will certainly hurt Ubuntu and similar, in that it will obstruct you from using Ubuntu to extending your PC life for another 5 years after MS Windows has started to run so slowly you think you otherwise would have had to buy a new PC.

I am reasonably technical, but I shudder to think how many hours I would have to spend on that "With a little extra effort with a signed bootloader, when the user has added the key."

And whether what Microsoft "say" will be what Microsoft do:

"Microsoft have said that they will sign boot-loaders for other companies who can't"

Didn't Microsoft tell the EU they would abide by the browser ballot anti-competitive ruling? And then fail to do so?

Saying and doing can be different , can't they?

Ubuntu for smartphones aims to replace today's mobes, laptops

This is an excellent idea

Because most other providers aren't interested in providing a PC replacement component to their smart phones (since the Atrix, Photon etc no longer seem to allow it) - and if Ubtuntu proves it to be a serious option, then others will jump on board, and it means I won't have to buy PCs anymore - my phone will replace my work PC once I attach it to a mouse/keyboard/screen.

Indeed, with those mini-projectors (to replace the need for a screen) and workable voice recognition to replace the keyboard, you could get away with just using the phone in the long run.

Google rolls out new, cheaper Chromebooks 'for everyone'

Seemingly rather a lot of Microsoft employees (or equivalents) posting here...

Are they scared? If so, I think they are looking in the wrong direction, because that iPhone connected to a mouse, keyboard and screen is probably going to inherit the earth, if that's OK with you, Microsoft...