Posts by proud2bgrumpy 89 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Dec 2013
I am continually _amazed_ at the level of poor design and poor thought that goes into products. My favourite (by which I mean most annoying) example being the battery hand vac, that I bought which when mounted in its charger (which I recently wall mounted as per instructions) causes all the dirt to fall out again - f*****g useless.
@AC - zero known vulnerabilities / zero known malware (because nobody can be bothered writing the malware or finding the vulnerabilities for a trivial userbase.
In fact - here are the stats from my dinky website:
Windows Hits: 374 (Win7: 274 / Win8.1: 61 / WinXP: 23 / Vista: 15 / Win8: 3)
Windows Phone: 4
iOS 191
OSX:61
Android: 121
Linux: 13
ChromeOS: 4
Blackberry: 1
@ P.Lee - Yes indeed - MS are playing a long game in a declining (for them) market. A few years ago - your only choice was a laptop or a desktop - probably running Windows, most people don't need that for browsing eBay / watching porn / trolling on Bacefook /watching cat vids on YouTube / sending emails - so Phones began to eat into that market, but most still bought a laptop. With tablets, your typical user gets the familiarity of their phone GUI and a larger screen to eBay / watch porn / Bacefook / YouTube / email- no need for a laptop. In the near future, as they enter into the workplace the automatic choice of buying into Windows isn't so obvious anymore (they grew up with Linux/Android or iOS) so Linux starts to get a foothold into the corporate desktop as it has into what was once only the MS Windows Server or Enterprise Unix space. MS has to make some serious changes in its business model if it is to stay relevent over the next 10 - 15 years.
The promise of the paperless office pretty much guarantees that despite all the masses of ?useless? data we create, the history of the last few generations may be completely lost in a few hundred years time. I wonder what the clay tablet scribes thought of the new-fangled papyrus scrolls when they first saw them? Probably "that'll never last" :-)
Battlefield Earth (terrible - thank god it's less than 2 Hrs), Gigli (haven't seen it), Pearl Harbour (terrible, and very, very long) are veritable masterpieces of writing, actiing and film-making compared to "The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D" which is so truly without any redeeming features that even my dog couldn't bear to be in the same room while it was (briefly) playing despite bacon sandwiches being available.
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D is without any shadow of doubt of less value than the celuloid it was printed on. At 93 minutes long, it is precisely 93 minutes too long.
I want one - for all the reasons you listed ;-) People like to tinker and differentiate - Sheeple do as they're told (and accept what they're given).
Going on holiday? Fit your eInk screen and get 4 weeks battery life / Fit your zoom lens camera module
Going to work? Remove your camera
Driving? Fit your GPS module
MS should give up on the consumer market - maybe buy BlackBerry and focus on the Business Market, hoping to grow into the Consumer Market as they take control of the Business Market.
Surface / WinPhone / Win8/10 should be consolidated into a single product-line, so that the Phone becomes the laptop or the desktopPC - dock it into a screen+keyboard dock-combo and the phone become a touchpad and the UI is presented onto a larger screen with additional storage and enhanced graphics and IO provided by the screen+keyboard dock-combo. Different size/capability screen+keyboard docks would provide different expansion capabilities. Perhaps automatically backing up data from the phone device when docked, optionally forwarding on to Cloud Backup.
This is real mobile/portable computing - all the synchronisation of data / files between different devices is just a massive PITA. So come on MS (or anyone) - make this device and I'll ditch my Android phone + my laptop + my tablet + my Desktop PC.
I can only use one device at a time, but different *form-factor* devices are useful *bodies* to use in different IT contexts - but I only need 1 *brain* to control it all.
"As far as I can see, Docker still doesn't have FT, HA or vMotion-esque features (unless you consider those to be present one level up, at the parent OS level). Are they coming in some future release?"
- Yes, I think that is exactly where those feature belong (actually with the Host OS) - a VM really shouldn't have the level of access to the Host to initiate such features, so a Container (which is itself one level further abstracted from the HW) shouldn't either. How would a VM or a Container know which Host it should move to? How could it know what environmental configuration settings to change?
@Firewalker
Well this may be greed-driven / incompetence - I really have no idea, but what I do know is that the whole story is a little more complicated - IBM (IMO) is trying to emulate the ARM licencing approach, it will design the CPUs and licence those designs out (check out the Open POWER stuff) to a bunch of companies - some of which you've heard of like Google / Samsung / nvidia and some you may not have like Tyan / TeamSun / ZTE.
IBM Power CPUs significantly outperform everything else from intel and Oracle/Sun by some margin, but don't get the advantages of volume that intel enjoy, so they cost more per unit. Open Power seeks to address that. Some of the companies that joined OpenPower would have issues with IBM retaining sole-manufacturing rights, so IBM sold off the Fabrication facility and have *more or less* pre-paid a 10yr (perhaps longer, I forget the details) outsourcing deal to guarantee production of Power CPUs.
A fabrication facility that can supply Power CPUs to a wide base than IBM and perhaps broaden it's manufacturing to include other architectures such as ARM will get the economies of scale that other vendors (and I believe all the other major Unix vendors enjoy)
@ Mark Exclamation
So - IBM ABN AMRO has outsourced to IBM for the last 12 years, presumably happily for all concerned since they just signed up for another 10 years - this combined with ABN apparently being the #1 Dutch Bank would suggest that comments are a bit silly, really - perhaps best to check a few facts in future...
Honestly who cares about the cross guard - from a practical perspective, it makes sense - otherwise what else would stop an opponents lightsabre simply sliding down your light sabre to your wrist.
More importantly, it seems that the new films have returned to the look of the originals (ep.IV/V/VI) and abandoned the overly clinical CGI look of the more recent Lucas movies (ep.I/II/III). Looks very promising.
My big gripe is that (almost) all screens are now shiny widescreen - Ok, for TVs - I get it, but on Tablets, Laptops and PCs Widescreen is at best annoying - but for content creation widescreens are downright cumbersome and unproductive - this is exasperated by applications from the likes of M$ that use this horrendous Ribbon which squishes the *usable* area of your document from a WideScreen 16:9 shape to something more like a letterbox. As for shiny screens - they're *ok* for use in a dimly lit room - but totally unusable outdoors where reflections make them unreadable. So some *quality* laptop manufacturers still produce business laptops with matt screens, but I've yet to see a single Tablets or Smart Phones with a Matt screen and by their very nature a Tablet or Smart Phone will largely be used outdoors.
Honestly, Phone/Tablet manufacturers, if you truly want to differentiate your product - just give it a matt screen and watch the sales flood in...
Interesting that Nuclear is now thought to be the cleanest way of generating energy, if the environmentalist lobby groups hadn't been so successful in campaigning against it in the 1960's/70's we probably wouldn't be in quite the 'supposed' mess we're in now with what used to be called 'Man Made Global Warming', then simply 'Global Warming' and most recently 'Climate Change'.
As the Environmentalist lobbies are slowly climbing down and re-branding 'Man Made Global Warming' into the more innocuous 'Climate Change', we should all recognise that the resources that we are currently burning to release energy would be much more usefully used to make stuff that should be reusable - not simply recyclable.
What about a car with a single lonely 80 year old heading towards a stolen car of 4x 20 year olds.
What about a car full of 80 year olds heading towards a car with a 20 year who has a terminal illness.
Honestly, the list of variables is almost endless, and so the time taken to process an infinite list will simply take too long to be of any use and anything less than a very, very long list will be pointless.
Unless we go back to a practical view of Car A is a 4x4, car B is a CityCar, so in an inevitable head on crash, the CityCar would lose, so it might as well just self-detonate to save damage to the 4x4.
There you go - problem solved, no progress made ;-)
@AC
"Why are Microsoft even trying. I have only ever seen 1 real person with a Windows phone..."
Because without Windows Phone, the next generation of IT decision-makers will grow up using Phones and Tablets based on Android(Linux) or iOS - neither of which is MS - home PCs usually PCs in the past are being sidelined by Tablets and the future decision makers will buy what they know...
Always remember that it's not the shop workers fault if the product you bought is crap - you can either a) get them on side to help or b) vent your frustrations at the crap product at them and try to intimidate. I'd suggest that starting at (b) will exclude (a) from ever being a possibility.
Of course, I also find that being decent to people also leaves me getting screwed over and scumbags with no sense of decency and incapable of feelings of guilt usually get their own way.
So it's your choice, be a decent person who gets screwed over, or be a scumbag who gets their own way - it's a matter of conscientious ie do you have one v does the person you're talking to have one. (honestly, sometimes I wish I didn't)
Of course it's pointless - and THAT is the point. Being able to show it working (badly) just demonstrates capability and possibilities, perhaps just succinctly shows how much computing has progressed in the 20 years since Windows 95. Here are some other things that you might think are meaningless / pointless / have no obvious purpose: Football / Personal Hygiene / Lasers / Politeness / Wasps / Music / Lists like this one
I remember those days well - I was living/working in Wimbeldon at the time. When Concorde flew over, everything stopped - not just because it was so loud you couldn't hold a conversation, but because everyone knew that this damp little island had produced something truly magnificent and we were rightfully very proud of it. Everyone looked always up to watch it sail over. I don't remember anyone ever complaining about Concordes loudness as it announced its passing overhead - whereas an unsilenced scooter screams its puny passage to everyones annoyance.
Yep - totally Trolling. I'd thought the 'Volume to 11' might have given that away...
Look there are so many *points of loss* from music source format (meaning file/record/CD) in modern HIFI to your ears and our ability to perceive the sound (including your age/occupation) that I have pretty much given up fretting over the fidelity of what I'm listening to. If you want to listen to music without any loss of quality, learn to play an instrument - better use of time than sitting in a darkened room with £££££'s of Audio kit worrying about whether you should have encoded that 1930's MP3 recording at 128K or 160 or should have gone lossless.
If you have it in digital format it's already lost data. If it's non-digital then it is degrading over time and use.
So learn to play an instrument.
I love it when Audiophile and Techies get into a hissing fit over music recording quality and which format rules and who can hear the difference or not. Why don't you just convert all your MP3s to FLAC to improve the quality, then turn the volume up to 11 on your virtual DJ App and sit back and enjoy the music played over the speaker of your iPhone / Android Phone...
Android gives you choice - thats the only reason to switch. There are no choices with Apple. Honestly, I think iOS is probably a little bit slicker than Android and my wifes £500 iPhone4 seems a little bit more reliable than my £135 Android Samsung Clone, but I can do anything I want with my Android and moving music / video / photos on or off the phone takes minutes whereas moving stuff on/off her iPhone is a day-long event - too much pain.
The reason why you shouldn't adopt any form of contactless payments is very simple. The banks hate cash. Once you have cash, the banks can't track your payments and therefore can't add a tiny percentage to every payment you make, so they make contactless (unauthenticated) payment cards available (with terrible security) to hopefully replace cash payments so that you buy your lunch time £1.99 sandwich with a wave of a card, you buy chewing gum for £0.60 with a wave of a card, every transaction (with these contactless cards) will have a tiny fee paid to the banks and of course the retailers will be forced to put the prices up to recover their cost per transaction. Pretty soon, the price of your lunchtime cheese and ham sandwich goes from £1.99 to £2.99 but you don't realise because you're just buying the same old 'cheese and ham' sandwich. DON'T DO CONTACTLESS PAYMENTS on a bank card or a smartphone - use cash.
- So Apple have spent Millions, perhaps Billions of Dollars designing a product with a removable wrist strap - that is this devices Unique Selling Proposition? Because honestly, you'd need to be a pretty devoted fanbois to be enthralled with the test of it...
Couldn't agree more iTunes ruins my day every time I have to use it. My wife has an iPhone, I get the miserable task of syncing stuff off her iPhone via iTunes and Inevitably, Holiday pictures get lost, bought music and transferred music gets lost and apps disappear. iTunes is the bane of my life. Why a *device* that probably has more compute power than my laptop requires that laptop is beyond me.
On the other hand, my £135 Chinese cheap-as-chips-takes-a-better-picture-than-the-iphone-knock-off-of-a-Samsung-Android phone has never lost a thing and it takes minutes to transfer any data on or off it - something an iPhone user just can't begin to comprehend.
- Really? So what other way is there to save money. Look - unless you are New Labour who just get to imagine money that doesn't exist in order to buy votes, then 'Robbing Peter to Pay Paul' - or - 'Managing Funds' is how stuff gets paid for. There is only so much money in circulation, you starve one budget (Peter) to feed another (Paul) as and when required. If you have any financial responsibility in your day-to-day life then you 'rob Peter to pay Paul' every day - ie: 'Can't go for a curry with the lads tonight because the car insurance is due' or 'Will pay to get the guttering cleared to avoid paying damage due to damp'.
Honestly - how else do you think budgets get managed other than Robbing Peter to Pay Paul.
I don't really understand why China is promoting this 'Chinese OS' alternative, other than as a 'vanity project' - I mean, it's not like the commercial Western Software (OS/Apps) cost them anything since they pretty much pirate everything. And that is really the problem, China is 'producing' many physical goods but Why persevere in the effort to write a new OS and develop the application environment to support it since their potential users will just pirate it when the West will do it for them for free... ...it's just not commercially viable.
Most phones look the same because they're doing the same thing. Look at TVs - they all look pretty much the same. Cars: 1 wheel in each of 4 corners to stop it falling over and space inside for people. Hats: bowl or band to keep it on your head and a rim to keep the sun / rain off.
It's only when a design breaks the mold that it stands out from the rest but their off-the-wall design may compromise their function: Robin Reliant (3 wheel car - prone to fall over), New square Blackberry phone (will it fit in your pocket). That wierd (comedy) umbrella hat thing (google it if you dont know what I mean) and of course the bizarre 1970's designed 'round TV's' (basically just a conventional TV screen in a ball-shaped plastic cabinet)
I have a pal who uses Chinese and Eastern European manufacturers to supply components for assembly of his *widget* in the UK. The individual components are worthless on their own and it is not possible to determine how they will be used in isolation from the completed assembly and part of one of the Chinese manufactured components is actually deliberately removed and thrown away during UK assembly. It is by no means the most efficient manufacturing process, but it is the only way to stop them stealing designs. And that is the problem with patents - a valid patent should enable the reader to completely understand the form and function of the item such that they can create a working version of their own. Of course, observing international patent law is essentially nothing more than a gentlemans agreement and patenting an idea actually only serve to put money into a lawyers pockets - there is effectively no protection.
Cramming is a learning process, you disseminate, analyse, organise and relay information back in an intelligible and ordered form - not the best, admittedly, but better than nothing. At the very worst, cramming forces the learner to excercise their brain-muscles if only for short-term benefit.
Copy'n'Paste from other peoples work found on google demonstrates no learning or understanding - only the ability to replicate - you might as well be a robot, you understood nothing, you contribute nothing, you gain nothing. Complete waste of everyone's time and energy, but you will get your *tick-in-the-box* that todays *learning-culture* expects.
There's an awful lot of dogmatism in teaching and very little questioning of 'perceived wisdom' - ie like: 'Computers are a valuable teaching aid' (they're not), like: Students are visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learners (there's no such thing), like: Learning by rote is bad.
MS have their backs to the wall. The current generation of <U>business</U> users probably had a PC with Windows XP/98/95/3.1 at home or at school and came to the working environment with the familiarity of the MS Office/Windows environment - having worked in their organisations for 5/10/15/20years, they become increasingly influential in their corporate IT investments, so they bought/buy Windows for the Desktop. Those that deal with important IT systems probably took some form of IT education at college / Uni where they were exposed to Unix systems, so they bought Unix and increasingly Linux Servers. Simple.
The next generation will come to the working environment having grown up with Android on their phone/tablet/TV or iOS on ther iPhone/iPad. They too will become influential in corporate buying policies, they will into buy Windows/Linux/OSX for their enterprise IT.
Each successive generation marked in say 5 or 10 year cycles will see successive dilution of MS Windows in the business place unless there comes a time that MS can once again dominate the home and education sectors - their only chance is to get Windows8/Metro (or whatever its called now) onto 90% of teenagers phones and tablets. If I were MS, I would simply give away Windows Phone 8.1 licences to recover their lost market and prevent Windows becoming a legacy/niche market.
The future is increasingly *NIX - ie: Some form of Unix or Linux (Android is a Linux Distro) or OSX or iOS which are both BSD Unix based. You think that Linux/Unix on the desktop will never happen? Think again - Linux/Unix has already won, we're just beginning to see the beginning of the end for Windows (not necessarily MS)
"We might ponder on the possibility of VMware developing its own containerisation technology, leaving a stub of operating system calls in each VM and having the core operating system code running with/below its hypervisor."
Err - isn't that vmWare ThinApp and M$ App-V?
- even if these don't conform to the strict definition of Containerisation, they have the same effects; encapsulation of the image, image portability, clean un/install, virtualisation of *shared* resources...
- tell me if I'm wrong.
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