Needed tick boxes not radio buttons.
Send all of those on the list?
Note: Antarctic + surgery on all of them first, including all reproductive parts (for safety).
Remove every part not essential.
9268 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Nov 2007
Maybe the idea was to burn MS and get out of phones. Which they did, MS paid maybe $1 Billion before Nokia sold phone division, then Billions to buy the phone division, BUT NOT *ANY* IP nor the Brand! Then MS has cost of closing the factories and making all the developers etc redundant!
Brilliantly played, Nokia. The phone division probably couldn't be saved as the rot was terminal and dated at least to about 2002 or so (killing Crystal, S80 and internal competition)
The original CE ones.
The Danger / Kin
The hybrid Zune GUI on CE
The Nokia ones
The NTified ones
The ARM surface
I'm not sure how to count them, and I expect MS to either completely rebrand phone or buy another phone to kill or get out of phones in the next year or so?
"black buttons on a black box labelled with black writing"
Or dark grey alien symbols on a black bezel that seems to be touch sensitive. BUT! Variable latency in response, so you learn to wait before trying a second time, as otherwise it turns on and goes to standby.
Black text on black flush buttons on Tesco DAB / FM Alarm radio, including volume, alarm cancel etc
Incomprehensible sequences of buttons with almost no GUI on a one line LCD. Impossible without manual or bright spot light and even then really hard.
Ergonomics is GARBAGE on consumer Electronics as they cost costs by having no knobs or numeric pads. Non-mobile Websites and desktop applications that all functions are hidden in a "hamburger" menu and GUI designed for a 320 x 240 display.
Much vaunted Apple Design takes worst aspect of Dieter Ram's minimise, which was too stark, designed to sell in showrooms.
We need to never sacrifice function or ergonomics for style or cost saving.
It seemed perfect to me.
So I got the secretary to show me her work flow. The document seemed to take a very very long time to open.
For years she had been typing every letter in the one file. She selected the appropriate block and then Print Selection to print a letter. She printed two copies. One to post and one to file. I asked to see how she filed them.
She had a wonderful paper filing system. So I showed her how to to duplicate it with folders for filing cabinets, drawers, sections and separate files. She did use her spare time to gradually convert the mega file to separate ones.
One wonders at the quality of IT training at Business Colleges.
No, it's rubbish PSU design. All too common.
Live somewhere rural with a loose connection somewhere in the overhead transmission and after a while "natural selection" ensures you only have PSUs that cope. Also bean counters realise a UPS isn't a luxury on a server.
IMO the best aspect of a laptop is the built in UPS, when you live somewhere with dodgy electricity. You KNOW you need to save often, but sometimes get so engrossed you forget. Or forget how you did the clever function or paragraph of text written just after the last autosave.
Formerly part of Philips, once the flagship Electronics giant of Europe, the TV and AV are badges for Asians and they have retreated to 1926 and making only light bulbs and health care.
Qualcom will be interested mainly in any IP. It will be a slow death for NXP.
You missed Intel took over Altera, Analog Devices taking over Linear Technology, Microchip ate AVR.
HP spat out its chips into two or three companies and more interested in selling ink than Innovation. HP Killed off the best Compaq lines and all remaining parts of DEC that Compaq had taken over,
It's not about Silicon Valley, but about the visionaries and founders dying and being replaced by bean counters. (In the past in UK, Pye/Newmarket Semi, Ferranti, Plessey, GEC, etc. Mullard was Philips since 1928). Inmos was sold to totally unsuitable owners (was it Thorn?) and eventually to Thomson.
Very many others gone too. Intermetall, MOS, Sylvania, Westinghouse, all important Electronics Innovators once.
East European, Baltic and Russian outfits you never heard of from the USSR days.
Mighty RCA gone in 1986, their brand and Telefunken eaten by French Thomson TSF and like Grundig and Akai a meaningless badge.
Consolidation.
My new biometric system uses a pet rat. If the information is stolen then you replace the rat and register the new one with the bank.
Makes more sense than human biometrics. Rats can also be trained to be loyal and bite a thief or even fitted with an NFC collar that kills it if it's stolen from you.
Really?
Maybe a great time to be a USA media company producing garbage that's eagerly devoured because UK channels have outsourced and racing to the bottom with reality TV.
The Golden Age for the UK and viewers ended in the 1980s.
We've seen the rise in Europe of the US style cable that I saw in early 1980s (and later Satellite) which has diluted content across too many similar channels, now often subscription, and sport move from FTA to people sometimes needing THREE subscriptions!
Though I agree, the FCC has lost the plot. They also seem determined to cripple Free To Air TV as well as give too much power to Amazon, Murdoch, Google's YouTube, Netflix and Apple etc, all of whom are parasites producing hardly any content and destroying FTA channels.
I hope much better and that CE is reformed as:
1) Most national governments / regulators don't police what is sold
2) Makers often dishonestly choose wrong category
3) Makers leave out parts after approval (see 1)
4) Too much self certification.
The idea of CE is good, implementation bad and made worse by antics of individual Governments and Regulators who then dishonestly blame EU.
Fines are also too low.
I can see no hope at all for regulation of security on IoT as many already are not designed well enough to meet SOGA "fit for purpose" and/or last 2+ years. Many with CE marks don't in reality meet RFI standards in normal operation, they use special test settings and scenarios to pass.
Technically EU Data protection laws, CE and SOGA *ALREADY* cover IoT security issues. But no-one with the money is interested in a court case against the makers. Governments and Regulators won't as they favour Big Corporates over Consumer (c.f. Ofcom's actions on Ethernet Power adaptors, Mobile roaming, BT, Sky's EPG costs etc.)
Back in the days of XP: "ugh windows bluescreens all the time, why do microsoft allow drivers full access to the kernel?"
That happened since NT4.0. Fixable by using decent graphics cards / Printer and drivers. But it should NEVER have been done.
Win7 / Win8 / Win10 are no more stable or secure than properly set-up up NT3.5, NT3.51, NT4.0, Win2K or XP when they were supported.
Win3.0, Win95a, Win ME were garbage. Win3.1x, Win95b, Win98, Win98SE were all far inferior to any NT version, Vista included, but at least could be set up reasonably properly, though practically zero security and no ability to create named pipes.
Garbage, that was a bug fix of Vista and should have been free to Vista Users. It was not an updated XP as it still depreciated GDI based apps (almost everything not a game or multimedia) in favour of the "new" Gamer and Eye candy orientated APIs.
Printer & Graphics GDI support should never have been moved into the Kernel (at NT4.0).
Till Vista.
From Vista onwards they don't seem to care.
They broke NT3.5 with applications for Win95 specially crafted so they would fail on Win3.x + Win32s. So I think (but may be wrong) that many got NT3.51 free, which fixed that.
Applications I wrote for NT 3.5 still worked on XP, but some few Win3.x and Win9x programs and games needed patches (GST Designworks, DTP, Alpha Centauri), it was less backward compatible compare to NT4 / Win2K. Vista / Win7 were dreadful, even breaking Paint Shop Pro.
WOW & NTVDM used to be quite good, but basically killed with Vista. (The DosBox VM /Emulator though was already better for DOS applications than NTVDM and works on later Windows as well as ARM).
Programs like Sage Line 50 are the main reason small Business have stuck with Windows since the Vista débâcle. MS needs to simply produce an updated version of XP rather than all these GUI and Marketing experiments driven by people with no interest in legacy software and clueless about GUI design. Forget Phone / tablet / Worstation / Console universal apps and copying Adobe and Google.
Don't call the OSes for Tablets, console or Phone or embedded "Windows". Differentiate and support the core business, desktop, properly!
This is Microsoft's fault. All XP and Vista drivers and programs should work on Win 10 otherwise it's pointless and people are better migrating to Linux.
Why?
Is he independently wealthy? A phone that costs more than many laptops (nearly £700 excluding accessories) and twice comparable phones made by others, though more awkward (no 3.5mm jack for car/hifi/earphonse, non-standard I/O connection compared to most phones, nearly impossible to transfer content without iTunes, glued in battery).
It's a shame the only choices now are really Android, or else Apple if you want to spend x2 more and have less functionality. Like 1995 to 2005 for PCs.
I was looking at a MS phone. The Win8 is poorer than Android, the Win 10 upgrade doesn't support some features and is as creepy privacy wise as Android. Shame as it's nice HW, though no USB host mode and probably doomed as a platform.
Scrap continuum and MS phone support altogether. It's a dying / dead market for MS. The desktop Windows has been crippled since win 8.x by this silly idea of one Windows for all devices. Just as stupid as making Win CE on 320 x 240 screens be a minuscule stylus pecked Win 9x GUI.
If a phone has enough "grunt" to dock to a desktop LCD panel, then the dock needs to solve the problem, or just leave it as it is. Anything else is going to be too much overhead for the phone or to crippling for a desktop. Perhaps you just want the phone storage to be on the dock/workstations file system and have a resizeable extra window on the desktop that is the phone screen, with keyboard / touch / mouse routed to phone when that's the active window.
Anyway, the MS concept is doomed to alienate Desktop users or cripple performance of the phone.
To avoid having any responsibility to actually see if Mobile operators meet the already too weak licence conditions.
If this was complementary, it would be good, but I fear it will be the only verification if enough users use it.
Self selected respondents result in misleading surveys. Will the demographic of those installing it be suitably geographically spread?
Really, or person to person via server?
Does Google track this?
Does Google ad Adverts?
Does the preview and download come from your "friend" directly or Google's servers?
Why only video it it's really peer to peer (Skype USED to do this)?
Me, sceptical about Google? If it's server based then it's no different to many other services.
It's not like it's Google, Facebook etc
Half a million and "Mostly harmless".
Certainly a waste of taxpayers money, but down the back of sofa stuff compared to most government waste, sadly!
WhatsApp, bought for $19B and going to steal privacy (for FB) from people that never signed up, because it has the contact data on the users phones.
My points in brackets:
Having used Windows 10, here are the advantages of it of Win7:
* It is faster (But XP is MUCH faster, with proper install /config)
* DirectX 12 (Marketing decision, not inherent)
* Multiple desktops (Available free as add on since at least 2002)
Sadly Win7 is only a bug fix of Vista, that's why Win10 is faster.
"But there are signs that businesses and professional users at least are keen on Windows 10, with European IT market research outfit Context reporting that Windows 10 Pro adoption is on the rise."
Well, what alternative have you to run Sage, Outlook based Scheduling and other corporate Windows only stuff etc?
Bears in the woods, Pope Catholic etc.
Forced rather than keen.
Impossible! Because naive friends, colleagues, family and acquaintances are giving WhatsApp / Facebook the info. Their Android apps are taking ALL the contact details on phones!
LinkedIn too steals 3rd party email data by tricking users that sign up.
Don't get me started on Google!
Then hold Whatsapp at arms length or sell it.
Stop making it easy for people to give you other peoples info
Stop asking for extra info to be added
Stop asking for phone numbers to turn on "features".
Stop stealing private info and monetising it.
Stop with the cheating on visibility unless paid.
Stop being a walled garden.
Make privacy simple and on by default.
Warn people they may be breaking the law if they post PRIVATE 3rd party text, email, numbers or photos on Facebook.
It's abrogation of regulation and pushing a failed format that only suits National Broadcasters.
Also the ergonomics of DAB for users is a disaster. AM/FM radios are superior.
Ofcom is pro DAB and anti AM/FM for political reasons.
Comreg has already done the same "promotion" of such a system here in Ireland.
This is typical Ofcom (and earlier Comreg) propaganda.
It's only a moderately clever achievement as 10 years ago I was doing this with MPEG4 HD DDT using an off the shelf card in a PC.
I don't mean at all to denigrate the techies that did this, just Ofcom's exploitation of it.
http://www.dektec.com/
It's easier with DAB.
Why are there no DAB pirates? The Technology is off the shelf.
It's not scalable. It only suits small, anonymous, distributed applications needing peer-to-peer communications.
Because it stores every transaction and every copy needs updated the performance dies as the history and number of users grows. Bitcoin has a worse problem than even the blockchain, it runs out of coins eventually and the coin generation mechanism is stupid.
A decentralised database for a world currency would need something completely different to Blockchain. Something akin to how a combination of IBAN and DNS works, hierarchical and regionalised. There is no governmental application at all not served better by a conventional secured client - server model.
Bitcoin as it is, is doomed to be a speculation vehicle, money laundering and also essentially a pyramid scheme. Tulips.
8051 is way below Z80 / 6502, it's a VERY limited micro-controller with Harvard architecture.
20MHz Z80 cores were available in SoC 20 years ago, so it's either an ASIC or FPGA with a Z80 core, or ARM with a Spectrum (and Z80) Emulator (available quite some time, 10 years?).
An 8051 doesn't even come close to Z80 or Cortex M0 ARM. It can't run anything other than 8051 code (which is nothing like 8080/Z80) and I don't think can run a Z80 emulator. They are still used in a Flash incarnation as legacy alternate to PIC16F or entry level Atmel AVR. Even the PIC 18F series is superior and wouldn't be used to emulate a Z80 either.
It would also have to run at the original clock speed (or simulate it in an Emulator) or many games wouldn't be compatible!