Posts by theOtherJT 1334 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2013
Well, no, they've got instant torque and gearshiftless acceleration going for them too. Also that whole "one moving part" thing in the drive train is nice, that ditches a ton of associated efficiency losses.
Like most things the problem is a matter of how to move energy around from where we make it to where we need it. What this proves is that we can turn electricity into car-like motion really quite effectively as long as the power source holds up.
Now what we need is to sic a whole load of researchers on the bits where the technology isn't there yet. Fast charging, long life, high capacity batteries would be excellent for everyone, not just cars, but it's pretty much "pick any two" at the moment.
You might not be totally wrong. As was said upstream, the volume market (businesses) only just moved from XP to 7, so they probably wouldn't have bought 8 anyway. We certainly never intended to. I sometimes get the feeling that perhaps they are just experimenting with 8 to see what the market will bear since they knew it wasn't going to be a big seller anyway.
I'm really not sure that's true. Yes, the Windows 8 core is better than the 7 one, but in so many respects the UI is fundamentally broken.
I know this is my go-to example, so it's been said many times before, but in Windows 8 there is no way to remove a cached wireless network that you can no longer see except via the command line! That's insane.
They fixed it in 8.1, but how the hell did that get through testing in the first place? I mean _why_ would you take the right click away from the wireless management? Why did they take away the "manage wireless networks" tab (which incidentally, even in 8.1 is still missing) from the network and sharing center? It just demonstrates a fundamental lack of thought about how the machine is likely to be used outside of some idealized testing environment.
Goddamnit Microsoft!
Stop messing this up! When I bought a windows 7 phone the better part of 4 years ago now it was without a doubt one of the best phones I've ever had. There was so much potential there. Yes, it was missing a lot of things, but as a ground up rewrite after the horror that was windows mobile 6.5 it really did feel like they'd nailed it, and just needed a few point updates to fill in the features that they didn't quite have ready for release days.
4 years later and not only have they NOT fixed half the things that were wrong with it, they seem to be obsessed with fiddling around with the bits that did work and breaking them all the time.
I really wanted to like this, because I've never had an android phone I could get on with, but frankly this just Isn't Good Enough.
There really is no phrase I can imagine wanting to see less in a law than "Is likely to". It's the ultimate in weasel words. You don't have to justify _anything_ once that phrase is in there.
Did someone break a law? No, but it doesn't matter tho, we thought they WERE LIKELY TO so we can act as if they did.
Horrible, horrible, dangerous wording.
I do. In an attempt to become a "one OS shop" (sadly still saddled with a few M$ boxes, but what can you do?) We're running 12.04 on 95% of our servers as well as about 400 of our desktops. It's been good, for the most part, and this looks like a move in the right direction.
The desktops have been fine, but the server end is where we've had problems, and it's actually nice to see them putting more effort into it. Up until now everyone has just said "You should use Debian"... they're not totally wrong, but again - one OS shop.
Puppet is a very welcome upgrade, since we're using that already so better support will be nice, and I've been playing with Ceph on 12.04 and not having a great deal of success with it, so that'll be interesting to try. Could potentially make a serious difference to our storage architecture if that works out.
I'll be throwing this at some test boxes as soon as it's released, then we'll have to do some long term testing and consult the users to decide if we're going to go with unity for the desktop. Seems likely we'll repackage with xfce again, and leave unity as a non default option like we did last time.
I stand corrected.
Believe me I want to like Windows Phone. In most respects I _do_ like windows phone, I just get the impression that Microsoft is messing about a bit and doesn't really know where it's going or how to get there with this one.
So yeah, I like it. I just don't _trust_ it.
You have to wonder if Microsoft is really taking this whole "Windows Phone" thing seriously.
Can you imagine google saying that to app developers?
"Yeah, we've got a new version of android ready to go lads, but by the way, if you install it, you can never go back. Oh, and the development tools are still in RC status."
...Then you remember that it's Microsoft, and contempt for their user base is pretty much par for the course. Such a shame, because I really like the devices, and I love the UI, but I'm just not prepared to buy one for my own personal use until I'm convinced that they're not suddenly going to pull the rug from under me.
You get badly punished for living/working somewhere with spotty signal. If i'm off work for a week and my phone stays with me at home (it's not a work phone, so the usage pattern doesn't change much) I can usually go 3 or 4 days without charging it.
As soon as I bring it into work the battery starts to run down at an alarming rate as it starts hunting for signal inside the giant faraday cage that is our building. I left it on my desk over night one time, and it was dead by morning. I get the same thing every time I go out to my parent's place in the wilds of rural Oxfordshire where there's no signal at all. Battery all just drains away looking for a tower to latch onto.
Run that pattern for a couple of years and you'll kill an ordinary phone battery stone dead. It's one of the reasons I really _do_ care about a removable battery. (Before we get into carrying a spare around for extended trips where you might not be able to get to a charger but can't possibly be without a phone.)
Personally, yes, I think it is that bad.
Now, I'm not a mechanic, I'm an IT professional - but if I were a mechanic, and someone offered me a car with the bonnet welded shut and when questioned said "Yes, well, despite having all the skills and tools required to service this machine yourself we'd really rather you didn't. Don't worry tho, we have an excellent warranty available." my first reaction would be to immediately go and buy something else.
You should not have to trade the ability not to avail yourself of the warranty should you happen to be capable of doing the job yourself in order to get the warranty in the first place.
There's _one_ thing Microsoft need to do to get Windows Phone to sell. One. They need to start releasing updates to fix bugs / missing features on a monthly scale, not a yearly one.
My parents both have windows phone devices, and they like them a lot - because they don't care about any of the things that are missing. I have one for work, and I like it a lot - because it's not my personal phone, and under the circumstances I don't care about any of the things that are missing.
I really wanted to buy a 1020, because my god, that camera... but after spending a few hours with one it was just too _annoying_
The engineering is there, Nokia's product quality is good, and I _love_ the WinPho UI, but I'm not buying one because it still feels feature incomplete compared to high end android phones.
I refuse to believe a company with Microsoft's money and developer talent isn't capable of fixing all the annoyances in Windows Phone, but for some reason it just feels like they can't be bothered, and this is costing them sales.
Of course it's not impossible to support iThings, any more than it's impossible to support Macs, but it's a bloody pain. They just don't play well with others, and Apple really don't give a damn about making life easy for you. In an environment with about 400 Linux machines, 100 windows machines and maybe 20 macs, the macs are the ones that generate a good 50% of the support tickets.
I put this largely down to the "It just works" mindset - which is the most dangerous thing in IT. Press button, thing happen, think not.
That sort of attitude is just no damn good in a large managed environment. "Why can't I connect to the wifi? It Just Works at home!" "Why won't it print? It Just Works at home!" It never occurs to anyone that a workplace with hundreds of machines and thousands of users might not be the SAME as home. Apple work so hard on hiding all the technical bits away that as soon as a user runs into a senario that isn't 99% typical for a home user they freak out.
We get sick of the users not THINKING, and that very quickly leads to getting sick of their silly shiny toys.
Because a lot of us WILL be forced to buy it, or some descendant of it, eventually. Businesses frequently depend on windows software that they simply are not prepared to (or in many cases just plain _can't_ due to the dependencies involved) have re-written so it can run on *nix.
In 5 years the thousand or so desktops around here are all going to need replacing, and what's the licencing deal going to be on the OS they're replaced with? Can I (or whoever sits in this chair at that point) convince anyone that moving to *nix is a viable choice? Not very likely. Windows is what we're stuck with, and the pain of supporting all those users through massive workflow changes is going to fall on whoever occupies this office - and other offices just like it all over the world.
I'm all for improvement, but 8 isn't a step forward, it's a step sideways at best, and that's just annoying for everyone.
I'd probably consider buying one of these, but if they stick to their guns regards the whole "If we don't raise the full amount then we're not going to build it." thing, then it's pretty obvious that they're not going to be building any.
Given how powerful modern phones are, and how shocking under-utilized most desktops are, having one device that can perform both functions sounds perfect - especially in a business type environment where all people do is email and Office... Not convinced this is going to be the device that gets us there tho.
Pretty much this. I mean, I unlocked my android handset when I got it so I could install anything I liked than then... and then did... sort of nothing, actually. Never found I needed to.
It's a _phone_ for gods sake. It gets email, text and phone calls. Sometimes I look things up on the internet to decide arguments in the pub. Occasionally I take photos... that's pretty much it. I've never really found that I want it to do more than that, and I strongly suspect that's true for most people.
Sure, technically those are applications, because _technically_ it's a general purpose computer these days and _everything_ (the phone included) is an application - but I wouldn't really class them as "Apps" in the "App store" sense of the word. I didn't have to go and download them.
The only thing that's alarmingly missing from WinPho from my perspective is a decent RDP client - which for a Microsoft product seems a little weird - but I very much doubt anyone who doesn't work in IT cares about that.
But "take its own sweet time promoting" is clearly causing a serious problem here.
Let's face it, what does everyone complain about with winpho? Apps. It's always the apps. How many smart phone users do you think actually _care_ about apps? I'm willing to bet the vast majority of iPhone users buy their iPhone, play about with it a bit, install angry birds, then never use the store again.
Most people - I don't mean the sort of people who read the reg, I mean people who don't give a damn about technology - do not care about apps. They care about shiny. They care about easy. iPhones are shiny. iPhones are easy.
Lumia's are easy too, and the more expensive ones are even shiny... but I'm willing to bet that although 99% of people will probably have heard of Nokia, a huge number of them won't even know that there _is_ such a think as windows phone for all the promotion it's had.
"Now once those filters are installed, it should not be the case that technically literate children can just flick the filters off at the click of a mouse without anyone knowing."
Would that be because they're pretty sure that those technically literate children haven't heard of proxying, or because they'll be extending the ban to every dirty little proxy service they can get their hands on once it's proven ineffective as it stands?
Alright, so it's basically what we all expected, yes? A 925 with a better camera. A _much_ better camera.
So, basically, did you like the 925 but want a better camera? Then here you go. I basically _did_ like the 925 so I like this. Have they missed a trick by integrating the battery and the storage? Well, yes, probably they have, but in that case so have Apple, because you can't change either of those things on an iPhone either, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their sales any. The nexus 4 doesn't have an SD card reader in it either, and we all like that.
I don't really consider either of those things to be a deal breaker tho. I'd like them, to be sure, but they're probably not going to stop me buying one. What _might_ stop me buying one is the price - and whatever the "next device" they half announced there for later in the year turns out to be.
That would be me then.
I never got even close to filling 32gb of SD card in my DSLR, and I never bought a compact because I use the DSLR for taking good photos, and the crappy camera in my phone for taking quick snaps. I frequently wished the quick snaps were better, but didn't want to carry another device.
Maybe I'm the only one, I don't know, but there's pretty damn good odds I'll be buying one of these as long as they don't get _really_ silly with the pricing.
I've never met anyone who actually _owns_ a windows phone that doesn't like it. I still fully intend to buy one to replace my current android set when it finally dies on me - not that I don't like my android phone, or any of the others out there that I could buy instead, but having used WinPho, I like it better.
Is it perfect? No. Nothing is, but I have no idea why people don't buy them. Some of them are even amazingly cheap. I guess the microsoft brand is just so tarnished people won't go near it even when they have a compelling product to offer.
My biggest problem with it is the UI (which I suppose you could argue is an "App" issue rather than an OS issue as such... ) The bones of symbian, the call quality, the battery life, the memory management - those are all very good but it has always felt like the S60 UI was a bit of an afterthought. Something knocked together from leftovers of S40 rather than something properly designed for touch control. It's come a way, since then, but there's still a sense that they didn't really try as hard as they should have and it's a lot less good than the competition. I don't know if that 640x360 resolution was a technical limitation or just a way they could cut the development budget by reusing stuff from the C6 but for something at that price point it really wasn't good enough.
Perhaps symbian could still be a serious player if it'd not been killed off the way it was - after all, the first couple of versions of android were bloody terrible, but that's gotten really nice now. What I want from a "modern" phone OS is something that handles all the "phone" stuff as quickly and easily as possible. iOS isn't bad, I think the current iterations of android are better, and as it happens I like WinPho better still... but I don't think any of the three are _bad_ as such these days.
It's a tough question to answer outright, except by example. I'd argue that winpho is a "modern" os, that android is, that iOS is aging a bit, but is still OK. Hell, I liked WebOS, thought there was a lot of potential in that, but the poor thing never really had much of a chance.
In an ideal world I'd take Winpho's ease of use, with Android's customizability, iOS's stability and Symbian's efficiency... doubt I'll get it tho.
The only thing that stopped me buying an 808 was Symbian and that stupid low res screen. Don't get me wrong, I had a 5800 which served me well for a long time, but it really doesn't cut it as a modern OS. I might be the only person who likes windows phone, but after owning 2 different variants on android and a WinPho device at the same time, the windows one was the one I found myself using most. That with a good camera fits my usage requirements pretty much perfectly.
