Posts by El blissett 34 posts • joined 10 Jul 2017
We restored a Mac Classic to working order in a middle-school computing project during the early 00s. It would complement the all-Mac computer suite by allowing people to work on real computing things and code in a safe, no Internet environment.
Reader, it lasted 1 week before it was relegated to Risk duties only.
Ultimately doing something different is really hard. You're on your own. I followed the development of Mezzo/Symphony in the 00s, which correctly identified the upcoming obsession with convergence and tried to design an accessible UI for all screen types not just the CUA/HIG terminal and keyboard. The developers would post these updates that showed their research was taking into account all types of users and not assuming the Win95 shell was the foundation. Unfortunately it was abandoned before it was completed and didn't get beyond putting menus in 4 places. http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/17107
Full-fat Enlightenment being vapourware is almost a meme a this point. Then of course there was the Moblin/Maemo/Meego fiasco which did a huge amount of work on fundamentally reimagining the interface of a computer for the 2010s, but again didn't go anywhere. I would argue it never got the chance to be offered as a serious alternative. The problem becomes that all the software you want or need to use has been built on the older paradigm of the CUA/HIG and developers have no interest in changing that. Unity/GNOME3 had to beg developers to make some applications compatible with the global top bar, but trying to reinvent the interface is just not people's priority when the people who have done it get burned.
On my first weekend job as an extremely untrained PFY, I was told to just do what I normally did for the same client during the week - look after the Mac kit on a bus/ring network during the day, make sure the OS X server was happy, then switch off and lock up when I leave. With a line of sight to the doors, I could live the life of Larry sitting in the server room doing whatever I liked, like fixing up an old Mac II to play Risk clones on or messing around with the likes of Photoshop and Captivate that I would never afford.
If someone quiet came in, and I was otherwise engaged, I wouldn't see or hear anything different if I missed them coming in the door. The server room was out of sight of the main room, and they hadn't told me anyone else was in - I couldn't see anyone else on Sunday night and wasn't expecting anyone. However, there was indeed someone in doing a sensitive sequential backup. As I left for the night, sending the shutdown command (which had been set to be ignored this time) and flicked the switches, I'll never forget the blood-curdling "NOOOOOOO!" my long haired silent colleague screamed as I wiped out his day's work.
Oddly enough I didn't lose my PFY status, at least until the long haired silent colleague became the long haired silent boss, but I never got asked to do weekends again.
Nothing nefarious about Huawei's kit or practices. Just that in a reverse of a recent Line of Duty finale, the world + dog would rather believe it's a red conspiracy rather than utter incompetence and laziness on the part of Huawei.
My isp just replaced my Huawei router and all the connection drop-outs and random packet-caused resets have vanished. I feel bad for all the times they called out Openreach when it was a PEBCAK.
My LG v30 (2017 flagship) is the most durable flagship handset I have ever owned. Barely a scratch on it despite dropping it maybe twice a week, and the battery life is still as good as new. The software and security updates delivered have been a running joke with LG and never really went anywhere despite their promise to improve.
While I'd love to have upgraded to something like the V60 or the G8S, they were simply too expensive and didn't offer enough of a reason to switch off of the V30. And LG's V-series niche in hi-res audio, while still top of the pack in terms of quality and engineering has reasonably similar technical equivalence in Xiaomis and other manufacturers selling better handsets that won't last as long but are half the price and run modern chipsets/Android.
LG as a manufacturer need to innovate to show off what they can do in terms of screens for other manufacturers, hence experiments like the V50 dual screen and the Wing flip screen, but it's not a commercial consumer oriented strategy for survival in a challenging market.
Ah, the Nokia approach to disaster management.
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