Posts by Daniel B.

Re: Ollila says there were several reasons for Nokia's spectacular decline

To be honest, Android would've been a bad choice as well. Had they pushed Meego a bit further, they might have done it well. Even Symbian Belle was looking pretty good, and that platform had a lot of developers before the Elopocalypse.

Hell, they had more options, going for a third-party OS was a last resort. MS should have always been a NO choice, especially if you've read how Symbian came into existence. Nokia had risen an alliance to counter MS in the mobile space, years before MS even digged the smartphone market!

Re: Odd.

But sex-mad? Absolutely not ... he was tech-mad. I never even saw him look at porn.

Watching porn is usually done when you have a lack of sex, or at least that was the case in college. Those who aren't watching porn aren't uninterested in sex, they're porking daily! Thus Steve's behavior would match someone having lots of rumpy pumpy...

Prepaid

Based on my last US experience, I'd recommend the TracFone PAYG handsets. Those cost $30 for the handset, but the cheapest minutes package will last you quite a lot, especially if you're doing mostly local calls. The SIMs aren't compatible with other handsets, but at least it is cheap enough for me to not care about it.

Re: Time to investigate the alternatives

Meh. At least two minimart chains have switched to Linux; I noticed it because the cash register GUI has a GNOME/GTK+ look & feel. It can be done, it just depends on how much time the company has to do the switch, and how much will they save by doing something like that.

Re: Ye gods...

Dude. This is the 2010s. Disks don't break anymore.

Au contraire, mon ami! Haven't you seen the awful failure rates of the newest HDDs? It is now more likely than not that you will have at least one disk failure when buying a batch of WDs or Seagates!

Re: Apple (someone had to raise this)

This would far less likely get through on the iTunes Store

They already had a boo-boo years ago. Can't remember the name of the apps or the vendor, but it was something like iMob or something like that; the app would slurp your contact list and other stuff and send all that data to the company selling the games. And they had all those apps get through the iBone Store! Which shows that the whole iTunes Store approval process is more of a security theater thing.

Expenses and strip clubs

Yeah, yeah, the wife tracks the bank statements. But really, she's not going to quiz you about a $500 lunchtime cash withdrawal?

Many years ago I went to a certain strip club and paid with my CC. The statement had it show that it was some generically-named "Regional Restaurant Operator". And during my last visit to Sin City, a cab driver noted that strip clubs in Vegas do the same thing, and that it's pretty common for those with corporate credit cards to charge such escapades as "food expenses". I doubt any of those guys has pulled a $17k bill though, that would raise red flags immediately. What would you eat for $17k? Diamonds?

Re: Its All About Getting Dev Support Early and In Numbers.

Right on one thing: Anyone betting mobile apps on html5 needs their head examined. It is stupid, even Apple tried that and failed (remember the original iPhone?). And burning previous SDKs is also stupid; the whole OSX transition in its time had Carbon released as a transparent transition route from Classic MacOS to OSX. And BlackBerry didn't even have the excuse of not knowing they were going down the wrong path: webOS had already crashed and burned by the time they started the BB10 transition!

Re: OMG

"I guess the best advice is: if you can't be bothered with a password then the fingerprint scanner is better than nothing."

If you can't be bothered with a password, you deserve to lose everything you had on your phone.. Nobody would leave their car unlocked on the street with the ignition key on, yet having a smartphone without password protection is the equivalent of doing just that. Of course, there are things that are worse than no protection at all, like 4-digit PINs and easily-hackable fingerprint scanners.

I'm surprised they didn't go for the Gummi Bear route, though...

It could be worse

They could've brought in the craptastic 'standing desks'! It's already horrible to spend 30-60 minutes standing on the subway during my daily commute (that's 30-60 minutes each way, not combined) and I'd be miffed if I had to stand 8+ hours as well during work!

Re: Which explains why it's so darned hard to swat a fly @Ledswinger

I use the cockroach variants of insecticide. Point it at fly, send a small spray. Fly will go down in seconds! And no need to make the entire room biohazard :)

@mike_ui

It amazes me how people love bashing MS all the time. Those who say they'd rather install Linux then just install it and stop complaining

I have on most of my desktop stuff at home. The WinXP install broke sometime around 2010. Still haven't reinstalled it or upgraded. Though you're spot on with the commercial software for some cases, which brings me to your other troll point:

As for IOS, don't make me laugh. I've yet to meet an I.T professional who'd rather use that than Windows. IOS is for posers who like to sit there and look 'hip'. I like to actually *do* stuff with my PC other than watch YouTube or a few video's.

Apart from the awful grammar/spelling mistakes that would make a Grammar Nazi explode (and mistaking OSX for IOS), yes you can do most of the stuff you do on Windows in OSX. And you can also do UNIXy stuff as well, which on Windows means either installing Services For Unix or a Linux VM. And a lot of IT professionals will choose OSX as their main OS, or even Linux above Windows. You're just hanging around with the actual posers.

Hell, Windows 8 sucks so much I actually bit the bullet and switched (back) to Mac/OSX last year. And this is despite me hating the iZombie Fanboy effect, Apple's attitude under the last Jobs years and their patent trolling on round corners, iOS walled garden and such. But Microsoft's lame attempts at forcing themselves into their users is far more insulting than the Apple way. Far, far worse. Sure I could have simply bought a new laptop, wipe out W8 and install Linux but I would have been giving MS money for Win8, which I don't want to. Buying a Mac means I don't pay the MS tax.

Re: Una cerveza, por favor

Oh man. You just reminded me of an incident that some friends had when they went to Barcelona a couple of years ago. They arrive at a hotel at 3am and they're looking if they have rooms available. So they decide to ask if the hotel is "in Service". The dialog went like this:

Friend: Hay servicio?

Hotel Attendant: Si, en el último piso

(all of them start going upstairs)

H: ¡Oigan! ¡Pero sólo de uno en uno!

(cue puzzled look)

This is when they all found out that "servicio" in Spain usually means "bathroom", so the attendant didn't understand "are you in service" but "do you have bathrooms?"

Re: Bah!

Indeed. Speed-writing on a Graffiti made me "type" faster than on a keyboard and write faster than on paper! However I do remember that the Graffiti used on the original PalmPilot and that on subsequent devices was different, IIRC because of a patent troll? Anyway, it was damn good, and much faster than actual handwriting!

Re: No PC Version...

You are living in the past. The Great PC Gaming Era is over. Get a PS3.

As much as I'd like to upvote you for promoting the PS3, I just can't because I still consider the PC a better gaming experience. Probably because of my golden gaming era being during the rise of the modding community with Quake1/2, I just can't consider the PC gaming era dead. Even less now that the new consoles are just going to be overpriced PCs (though I'm still probably going to get a PS4).