* Posts by P. Lee

5267 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Dec 2007

Windows 8 market share stalls, XP at record low

P. Lee

Re: Obvious answer to obvious stupidity is obvious

> You alienated your biggest market, CORPORATE BUYERS, by making an OS that looks, and acts, unprofessional, unproductive and like a home infotainment appliance.

While I utterly agree with you, there are a couple of things to be said in MS' defence:

1) Business had just completed/still undergoing the XP->W7 upgrade. They would not be going W8.x no matter what.

2) If MS does not reverse the trend for home users/small business users continuing trend away from Windows to tablet/cloud and OSX which mean cross-platform apps, they will end up letting Linux into the desktop arena which will then eat away at MS' core corporate market.

Yes, its a bad strategy which hasn't worked, but I understand why they tried it.

Hey, what's inside those Imation Nexsan arrays? Whoa, bundles of cash?

P. Lee

Decline in optical

They do realise this is due to comparatively rubbish optical capacity, right? And they do know that this became a problem a good five years ago at least?

Perhaps the new storage array business isn't growing fast enough because its over-priced? I don't know about Imation, but I worked for a consultancy where the SAN Solution was 7000 AUD *per terabyte*. And they thought that was a good deal. At that price, a motherboard with 14-22 SATA ports on it begins to look like a good deal. Have you wasted a lot of disk space? Yes. Are you still saving a load of cash? Yes! You can hire an extra administrator pretty quickly on those kinds of figures.

The Therapod diet: From humungo dino to tiny bird in 50m years

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: Bleedin' obvious, innit?

>Miniaturisation was the only logical course.

Well, perhaps. Or they just died. Archaeopteryx pretty much had modern feathers (i.e. its a bird) and the link between dinosaurs and birds ("the ancestral paravian (~165 myo)") is, despite its picture and given age, missing. Loathe as I am to quote wikipedia, "The ancestral paravian is a hypothetical animal;" someone made it up.

Try pulling a trick like that in the AGW debate...

CIA super-spy so sorry spies spied on Senate's torture scrutiny PCs

P. Lee
Childcatcher

Re: oh, sorry!

> There's chocolate?! Why am I always the last to be told?

It's American chocolate. No-one else in the world agrees that it fits the definition and the withholding it is actually a reward for a job well done.

Turnbull to Big Content: Let your movies RUN FREE ... for a fair price

P. Lee

Re: Copyright only for available content

+1

Given that physical distribution of media is almost defunct with the loss of video rental shops, simply ban geo-location pricing and limitations for Australia, (force access to US pricing and markets) under pain of "we're really not that interested in prosecuting torrent users."

Call off the firing squad: HP grants stay of execution to OpenVMS

P. Lee

Re: hmm POSIX

Ooh, Lasermoon! My first ever purchased Linux distro. Closely followed by Caldera when I discovered they supported my turquoise-green "froggy" adsl modem out of the box, which red hat didn't. I'm still on SuSE, even now.

Hey, big spender. Are you as secure as a whitebox vendor?

P. Lee

Re: Sticking everyithing behind a firewall sounds like a good first step but...

Yep, Out-of-band management goes on a firewall segment with only super-user access. It's roughly equivalent with standing in front of the host.

That said, I'm amazed at the rubbish Tier 1 vendors put out there. With the cost of a Checkpoint firewall, you'd think they could include an Atom-SBC with a mainstream linux distro on it which is properly maintained, not some hobbled ancient debian-on-ARM rubbish from the last century with most enterprise features (LDAP, two-factor auth etc) missing. All you really need to do is hook it up to a serial port and the power supply switch.

Microsoft: IE11 for Windows Phone 8.1 is TOO GOOD. So we'll cripple it like Safari

P. Lee

>I do like the placement of the address bar at the bottom of the screen. Far easier for thumbs to reach.

While it is completely irrelevant to the standards/user-agent issues, what happens to it when you scroll down?

Microsoft blasts sueball at Samsung over Android patent royalties

P. Lee
Happy

> Microsoft is about to discover that they are not the boss any more.

Or more accurately, we'll find out exactly how much Samsung want to license other MS tech, like OEM Windows. That would be OEM Windows 8.1...

You're right, MS may not be the boss any more!

Microsoft's Euro cloud darkens: US FEDS can dig into foreign servers

P. Lee

Re: Damned if they do and damned if they don't!

Not really. It just raises the cost.

I'd expect all data to be synced to multiple data-centres and T&C's in all usage agreements saying that you don't mind data being stored in the US. This is Cloud, so the idea is that you don't care where the data is stored.

There are two parts to this:

a) Explicit Cloud usage. You don't use the cloud to store medical data for example. That's obvious and simple to deal with.

b) "sneaky Cloud." That's things like storing all your search history from Bing/Google and siphoning off all your contact data from your address book for "synchronisation purposes."

If I had important sensitive data, I wouldn't be happy with this ruling. Ms Merkel's email is going to be available to the US government anyway without spies doing anything in Germany, if she's using Apple, MS or Google email. That's just annoying and will likely drive alternative tech companies. SmallCo might use Outlook 365, but no-one larger is going to touch it and without enterprise buy-in, the money for cloud development will be in short supply.

Good.

(Of course Ms Merkel won't be using non-government servers anyway. That means that there is a space for a decent smartphone with no ties to US companies. Jailbroken Android? FirefoxOS?

Nintend-OH NO! Sorry, Mario – your profits are in another castle

P. Lee
FAIL

Also... Prices!

Mario Kart still selling for $36 in Costco. Say what? I normally stick to the under $5 / under $10 sections on Steam which includes a lot of big name games. I have over 130 of them. So the Wii has Sports and not much else in my house.

Yes, fun > HD graphics but you'd have to give me a pretty good demonstration of extremely amazing fun *before* I parted with $36 for a game, on an ageing console. Age isn't a factor per se, but analogue ports on TV's and computer screens are fast disappearing.

Perhaps I'm not the target demographic, but its a pretty dangerous game for a console maker to ignore other form factors as competition. I can't see the tablet generation paying $36 for a game either.

Has Europe cut the UK adrift on data protection?

P. Lee

Re: Little Englander syndrome

Inside the tent or on a train heading for a broken bridge? Analogies do not truth make.

I'm not sure why the author thinks the UK would leave the EEA. For a sceptic, that would be the very best place - all the trade benefits and none of the political malarky.

The EU is a bit of swings and roundabouts. Some decisions are so much better than the corresponding ones made in Westminster. Unfortunately, democracy doesn't scale well. It can be logistically achieved, but its purpose, the goal of self-determination, is lost.

Bloodthirsty Apple fanbois TEAR OPEN new Macbook, bare its guts to world+dog

P. Lee
Unhappy

Re: Rich as folk

You think that's funny?

I've been pricing up water-cooling for my single CPU, single GPU desktop: north of AUD 600

I'm still trying to work out how a 250ml waterproof plastic box can be priced north of $40.

Microsoft stands on shore as tablet-laden boat sails away

P. Lee

Microsoft... just stop it!

You won't win this way.

Tablets have little must-have functionality they are a (fun and useful) toy. Nobody wants a toy that reminds them of their day at the office, and the very name "Windows" does that.

If MS wants to take the tablet market they have to do it by inertia: lots of Windows laptops with detachable screens and some serious power reduction on intel (or more a flip-switch to "tablet mode running ARM").

If I were them, I'd be investing in ARM co-processor tech, where tablet-type apps run and sync on both intel and ARM processors on the same hardware. Is that you, AMD? Atom would probably be easier, but I doubt it would ever be cheap enough to be viable. Perhaps if Intel put an atom on an i7 die... [dreams...]

Personally I think PC hardware needs a shake-up. I want low-power server tech combined with a high-power client. Don't attach disk directly to the client, let it run off a virtual 10G/ethernet link to a "server." Any reason not to have an atom motherboard with an i7 on a PCIex16 Gen3 card? There probably is, but that's what I'd like.

YES, iPhones ARE getting slower with each new release of iOS

P. Lee
Unhappy

Somewhat missing the point

People wouldn't complain if you could downgrade your iphone after an unsatisfactory upgrade. Even a wipe and re-install would be fine.

"Apple has the customer's interests at heart" is thus shown to be a lie.

I have a 3G. If Maps ever works (which is rare), the phone requires a reboot as afterwards it even has problems executing "Accept" for an incoming call. I know its old and we shouldn't expect new stuff to work on old kit. I do expect to be able to run old stuff on old kit, though.

Yes, Australia's government SHOULD store comms metadata

P. Lee

No, no they shouldn't

There is little utility in it for anything the government should be doing.

Even good governments will tend to misuse the data (scope creep, commercialisation, corruption of electoral wards, analysis of political activity in aggregate or otherwise).

Godwin! Do you think the "best democracy" in Europe anticipated Hitler's rise to power? WWHD (with that information)? (blackmail, arresting those with who look for directions to the nearest synagogue or visiting undesirable websites)

That's still our money being used to pay for people to spy on us.

All people die eventually. I prefer to risk the few, very unlikely, bombs of sworn enemies to the certain corruption of my "friends".

Amazon says Hachette should lower ebook prices, pay authors more

P. Lee

Paper vs ebooks

I'll take the paper thanks. The secondary market is good, allowing people to see books they wouldn't look at if the only preview was a website database. The cost of paper is, I understand minimal next to author and marketing costs. Ebooks are fine for books you don't care about - Nancy Drew #153 perhaps or a book club book you didn't want to read anyway. No paper mostly saves amazon delivery costs.

What we really want is an ebook emailed and the paper copy put in the post. The price differene between ebook and paper book is not enough to justify losing the paper version. Amazon can take a hike on this one.

Apple winks at parents: C'mon, get your kid a tweaked Macbook Pro

P. Lee
Headmaster

What child needs a macbook pro?

Is school too hard for an MBA?

Hold on a minute... isn't school designed for training people? What's the point of setting up an educational system... and then getting a machine to solve the problems?

Just TWO climate committee MPs contradict IPCC: The two with SCIENCE degrees

P. Lee

Re: Serious (maths) question ...

>"chaotic" means "complex and highly sensitive to initial conditions"

> The short answer is that regular sampling can give insight into trends and correlations.

I think we've reached the nub of it. The problem is that "complexity" beyond our capability to understand is indistinguishable from "non-deterministic." So we fall back on trends and correlations which leads us back to "consensus" which is just stats and may lead to thinking there are relationships where there are none or it may indeed identify relationships - there's no way of telling the difference.

Perhaps if the government said, "no you can't build a new housing development on a flood plain without Dutch-style flood prevention" they might have more credibility than when they say, "let's sell pollution licenses and create a market for trading them." Which is what it really comes down to. If the government really believed that the science was settled then they could stop funding the science research and start funding the countermeasures. Which they aren't, so we don't believe them. They appear to be more interested in the story-telling of climate disaster than in mitigating said disaster.

Mozilla keeps its Beard, hopes anti-gay marriage troubles are now over

P. Lee

Re: Mozilla Lost Me

> If he is active enough to donate, he would be active enough to oppose or reject any recognition of

> gay unions within his company, to oppose health benefits to same-sex couples

Since when does a company officer get involved in approving or denying relationships in a company? I'm pretty sure I never got permission from my manager when I got married. Do they provide benefits for non-employees? Historically, benefits were extended to female spouses on the assumption that they probably would be at home looking after the offspring rather than being in paid employment which would provide its own benefits, or a woman's career is more likely to be limited by a large time out to look after the children. I've seen organisations operating benefits which only applied to men on this basis. They've changed their policies, but that was the original reasoning. While the law has been changed in the name of equality, this generally still holds true for heterosexuals - I'm not sure if it holds for gay couples or not.

Then there is the issue of differentiating between gay unions and gay marriage. We had equality in the UK, but still the gay lobby pushed through legislation to call gay unions "marriage". That's not a rights or benefits issue, that's social engineering. Now its difficult for me to expect that similar actions elsewhere are rights-issues rather than social engineering.

It's curious that Eich received so much flack for a "no" opinion, but Google and Apple execs received no censure for expressing their opinions. I get really concerned when I see suggestions that opposing opinion should not be voiced. No dissenting opinions allowed? That's not a freedom and it isn't how democracy should work.

There's no suggestion at all that Eich's opinions negatively impacted his employees. That's what we call "professionalism" in the workplace- doing a job regardless of personal opinions and officers and employees are including Eich are expected to exhibit it. There are plenty of people I work with whom I don't like for one reason or another but that doesn't mean that I treat them as an enemy. That would be childish. There are plenty of people I meet with socially with religious and moral practises of which I don't approve, but I don't treat them as enemies either, that would be wrong. I often work for organisations where I don't agree with all their practises. Perhaps that blows the mind of those engaged in simplistic politicking, but its true. I'm not out to destroy all those who disagree with me. In fact, listening to opposing arguments keeps me on my mental toes and helps me clarify my own thoughts rather than sinking into a morass of monopolistic group-think.

Sadly, politics these days is increasingly involved with legislating thought and speech crime. That's a dangerous precedent to set, even if you like the current rules.

KDE releases ice-cream coloured Plasma 5 just in time for summer

P. Lee

Re: but...

opensuse 13.1 is quite reasonable.

The first thing to do is switch the system fonts from sans serif to Nimbus Sans L and everything looks much better. Even PulseAudio works.

I like the network transparency of X. It helps with messing with the server in the garage. I'd vote for more network transparency if I could. I don't want to have a whole desktop and then try to filter bits out, like citrix does. I really dislike RDP just to get one application running. Far better to put the effort into smarter clipboard systems and perhaps wait for HTML derivatives to allow the lower bandwidth interfaces. You could always run squid on a desktop/tablet host - its the bloodsucking advert slingers and video streamers that gobble bandwidth by breaking caching.

Asteroid's DINO KILLING SPREE just bad luck – boffins

P. Lee

Re: 'victims of colossal bad luck'

Which begs the question, "is it reasonable to expect any meaning from randomness?"

If not, everything you see and think and feel is purely a function of the random which came before it.

You and the rock at the bottom of the garden are as important as each other.

Now we know why politicians act as they do.

Indie ISP to Netflix: Give it a rest about 'net neutrality' – and get your checkbook out

P. Lee

Re: Mis-framed statement

Agreed. The argument from the ISP is that Netflix should stop putting so much effort into net-neut lobbying and more cash into caching. The two issues are unrelated except that the resources being put into one are eating up resources which really need to be put into the other.

While I understand the ISP's problems and irritations with Netflix, we do need a well-funded net-neut supporter. Sub-headline quotes were not well chosen as it appeared that the ISP was anti-net-neut (pay for traffic) when in fact they just want them to pay for their own CDN kit, which is quite reasonable and not anti-net-neut at all.

There is no little reason for the Netflix boxes not to run as a proxy. Even Squid can do some clever stuff with pulling content from youtube and then serving it as static content from a local web server. There's no reason for netflix not to do something similar and ease the load on systems where much of the data is never served. The performance hit from running as a proxy is nothing more than having no content servers at all and its limited to the first user. There's no reason not to pre-cache things you know will be popular. For the sake of a slight performance boost for the first user, Netflix is being rather obnoxious.

I'm a little surprised by the proxy/server ratio in the real world. Here in Australia we have really poor access to the Packman repo's. There are mirrors but the update lags cause problems with failed package installations. I have no idea why you would want to dedicate disk to a mirror when you could offer a front-end proxy which will always be up to date.

ONE EMAIL costs mining company $300 MEEELION

P. Lee
Stop

Re: Headline wrong?

No it's high risk because they are gambling on stock price fluctuations, rather than investing in the company and looking for a dividend return based on the company's profits. Company profits are unaffected by the event.

If the pension fund was gambling, that's no better either. Anyone who knows the company, and is investing in the company will know what they are doing and could hold their nerve. Those investing in stock as a commodity would have been burnt.

Don't gamble. Certainly don't gamble with other people's money. That's what causes big bubbles and big losses.

Researcher sat on critical IE bugs for THREE YEARS

P. Lee
FAIL

Bug or Design Flaw?

Surely this is yet another example of MS putting security (or lack of it) into the GUI where it doesn't belong. The security should have been on the file system and the GUI should run as the user. Even if you have have horrible buffer over-runs in the code, a dialogue box should be running at the same level as any other user process.

Ah, you've put stuff in the kernel because you value speed over security? That isn't careless coding, that's a design fault.

I know, I think all major OS's do it, but I think Windows is almost the only one left that you pay for isn't it? Rather like in most citrix configs I've seen. You're blocked from accessing C:\...\cmd.exe in Explorer, but you can go through a file->open dialogue box and get to it.

Pretty much the whole point of an OS is to sandbox applications and provide them with their own "virtual machine." At least, that's what I was taught over two decades ago. Now we have more CPU power than most people can use, perhaps it is time to do things properly.

SMELL YOU LATER, LOSERS – Dumbo tells rats, dogs... humans

P. Lee

Re: Polar Bear

My wife says that while camping in the Mara (a long time ago) in the morning there would be lines in the dust around the car doors where elephants had sniffed along the door seals for the water that was in containers inside.

Microsoft: We're making ONE TRUE WINDOWS to rule us all

P. Lee

Re: One OS

What lies at the heart of it is not just "decorations."

Different form factors and screen sizes mandate completely different ways of interacting with an app. In short, even if you did make one OS/kernel/architecture to rule them all, people wouldn't want to run a desktop app on a phone.

The upshot is, you still need different app development skills for different form factors, even if the OS were the same. There is no silver bullet to transform a desktop monopoly into a mobile one.

MPs to sue UK.gov over 'ridiculous' emergency data snooping law

P. Lee
Mushroom

Re: How long....

You mean the constitutional crisis provoked by urban MPs over the issue of rural pest control?

What a great day for British politics that was!

No, I'm not a hunt support, but that was stupid and embarrassing grandstanding.

Climate: 'An excuse for tax hikes', scientists 'don't know what they're talking about'

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: People of the world?

No actually, "the world" is correct.

Some ancient Babylonians hailed Tiamat, goddess of chaos and salt-water from which all things came.

In our highly evolved society, we don't use that name any more. Progress eh?

HP, Microsoft prove it again: Big Business doesn't create jobs

P. Lee

Measurement confusion

Part of the problem is the confusion between producitivity and profit.

For solid growth, you need productiivty - doing something useful. However, profitability can disguise non-productivity. The problem in the West in general is that far too much depends on marketing rather than production. The core dev teams for Windows, MS Office etc are tiny compared to the overall organisation. Blanket advertising forces out competition - that's why we get the massive campaigns around the Voice et al. They have to exclude competition from mindshare in order to succeed. This isn't about being productive, meeting needs etc, this is about using previous profits to crush competition - not specific competitors, but competition in general.

We then end up with monopoly profits which hides inefficiencies in big business in a way they couldn't in small business. That's why you suddenly have large cuts - it takes a long time for the problem to be evident and then critical to deal with. People are getting paid, but productivity is low for their job.

Herein is the problem with MS software recently: using windows 8 over windows 7 or windows XP doesn't make most people more productive. Or at least, not enough people in the organisation are more productive to warrant the upgrade. Software has gone from an enabler, to a very large cost centre. There was some benefit to going 64-bit (i.e. v7 for Windows) but after that, MS have not really added much in terms of end-user productivity. Win3.11 to W95 gave significant UI features. Win95 to (NT/)2000/XP gave significant stability increases, W7 gave address space and UI advantages. Now (in the Windows World) we have a reasonable UI and stability. What more are you expecting from an OS?

What I want more from an OS is all the stuff they have been pumping into hypervisors. That should be in the base OS if they want me to upgrade again. UI tweaks won't cut it.

Of course, *nix/floss users are (rightly) a little smug. I don't know if MS have noticed, but I'm seeing a lot of indie games arriving for linux. I don't know if its linux per se or general cross-platform to get the OSX crowd or prepping for Android/IOS releases (probably all three) but if I were MS I'd be worried about 5 years down the line. Games are less OS dependent, but with excessive CPU power comes platform independent applications. Hard financial times mean that previously unassessed decisions come under scruitiny.

Cheer up, Nokia fans. It can start making mobes again in 18 months

P. Lee

> Bring on the high-end Nokia droids!!!

+1

If you want to be independent of Google, maps are the killer app that's the hardest to do, and Nokia has them. Search is usually browser-based and can be farmed off to google.

Put a security/privacy sandbox around apps on Android and sell it to business. Do a filtered, advert-free-app store with proper FLOSS and paid apps.

Perhaps do an Apple and produce some decent app software themselves.

but I must stop dreaming...

Boffins fill a dome with 480 cameras for 3D motion capture

P. Lee

Re: Camera phones at sports events

> it is improbable it will capture anything worthwhile

Tag the picture with GPS and compass data and you might be able to calculate line of sight to see if its worthwhile adding the image to the processing stack.

Intel teaches Oracle how to become the latest and greatest Xeon Whisperer

P. Lee

Re: this sounds like something VMware would want...

Surely if you have a 15-core box and you are switching off cores, then you're doing virtualisation wrong.

P. Lee

Re: Smells like copy-protections

Have an upvote.

I despise software houses who want to own and control your hardware too. The last thing we need is to get further into the position where application software counteracts hardware advances by switching off cores and down-clocking the CPU. I know it could be useful, but I've seen humanity at work.

Yes, I hate "appliances." Market segmentation on the flimsiest pretense.

NASDAQ IT security spend: $1bn. Finding mystery malware on its servers: Priceless

P. Lee

Re: You are confused

but..but...but we buy expensive software from reputable vendors so that _they_ take the risk...

Whaddayamean "they don't"?

Will the next US-EU trade pact prevent Brussels acting against US tech giants?

P. Lee
Holmes

Re: Please tell me I'm wrong...

It usually does though Europeans do tend to despise large corporates more than Americans. Perhaps because the large corporates tend to be American.

Anyway, I smell a headline grabber. A stupid overblown clause designed to distract attention away from the rest of the pact and be discarded.

UN to Five Eyes nations: Your mass surveillance is breaking the law

P. Lee

Re: Dangerous precedent

> Firstly comparing any potential trial against Snowden to the Nuremberg trials - against individuals

> complicit in the torture and death of millions of people - is at best questionable.

At this point, possibly. However, the infrastructure has been put in place what the Nazis or the Soviets could only have dreamt of for spying on their own people. All we need a a financial jolt large enough to make a lot of people hungry and people will accept any leader charismatic enough to persuade them that he has a solution to their problems.

I have little fear of Islamic international terrorists - they have a track record of doing very little damage. National governments on the other hand have a long history of terrorising and slaughtering their populations.

Microsoft: OK, Office 365 sellers – you can be customers' 'first contact'

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: In other news-

Haha!

You are now first line hell-desk support! With all its attendant roles, privileges and responsibilities... and pay.

Dungeons & Dragons relaunches with 'freemium' version 5.0

P. Lee

Re: Paper shortages

No XP rules...

That's in the premium pack?

WiGag war: Tiny low-power chip promises mobes 4.6Gbps Wi-Fi

P. Lee

Re: 60GHz! Are we all standing right next to the transmitter?

>So you need line of sight for this to work reliably?

I'd doubt that's too hard. Mostly you'll want to sit in front of the telly with your phone and use the phone as a remote.

This isn't for general in-house networking, but fast sync and video display. Few people use 4k video, so the extra bandwidth mostly helps cope with interference. However, being able to properly use my 27' screen from a mobile device sounds nice. It might even allow desktop apps on a phone...

I might settle for a magnetic-connected optical link + power cable rather than running down the battery, though.

Huge FOUR-winged dino SPREAD LEGS to KILL – scientists

P. Lee

Extra precise?

I think your local peregrine falcon would suggest that isn't the case.

Nadella: Yes I can put 2 THINGS FIRST. I will say them at the same time – CLOUDOBILE

P. Lee

Re: "'We are building an operating system for human activity'"

>I think he means 'Not just Office, but, like, life 'n shit.'

>Photos! Documents! Memories! Shiny people!

Except that MS don't do that stuff. Cloud is a vendor dream. Business customers only accept it because running server-software is too hard and decent load-balancing is too expensive. Personal customers don't really care and don't know how their data is being farmed.

Google's cloudiness works mostly because of google's high-speed network infrastructure. Apple's cloudiness works because they put the UI in people's hands and they have apps which do things for people. Look at their ad's - its all about how Apple stuff enables you to do cool stuff. What does MS do? They have no iLife and precious little mobile market share.

Mobile is not a great money-spinner. The apps are mostly trivial and fashion-driven or simply interfaces to (mostly web) servers. The prices are not that high either - you make money by becoming famous and selling for 99p.

MS are squeezed by Apple on the personal side and being pushed into a "business only" OS. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but you get no fashion purchases and in hard times businesses like to sweat the assets. Even in non-hard times, the telephone system rarely gets an upgrade, so Lync goes in and won't be replaced in two years time.

Then there is the whole, "what is an OS?" Does he mean Windows gains sensor-awareness? e.g. GPS, tilt, finger-print capabilities? "Human activity" sounds like Userland Apps, not OS territory. The OS is the application / hardware interface manager.

Hey, channel guy. STOP. Don't lock yourself into vendors' refresh cycles

P. Lee

Why bin good kit?

That's why the vendors are in trouble. It used to be that the new kit was measurably better. Now they've realised "measurably better" doesn't trump, "good enough for purpose" and that's where we are.

Consolidation has been driving the industry for a bit, but that's reaching equilibrium too.

First there was the drive to (underpowered) appliances because normal servers were too fast to segment the market. Then the push to Cloud, so that customers can't see what's going on.

It's all very well, but if Lync in the Cloud does really well, someone will do a decent Asterisk/AD hookup and that MS app-rental model is going to come under attack.

Did your firewall vendor make the thing too complicated to use in an effort to build an "ecosystem" of skilled engineers? The Cloud might sort that out, but once the firewalling is an outsourced function there is less reason for pretty GUI's and all the other things which sooth customers and a whole lot more pressure on price.

Do YOU work at Microsoft? Um. Are you SURE about that?

P. Lee
Trollface

Re: ATTENSHUN!

> Some people want something new, whether or not it's better.

That would be the marketing people.

> I want something better, whether or not it's new.

That would be why the tech industry is in trouble. You destroyer of the economy! Why can't you just consume the new stuff like everyone else?

Native Americans KILLED AND ATE DUMBO, say archaeologists

P. Lee

Re: We kill and eat Wilbur. And Nemo (if not Nemo, several of his cousins). And Bambi. And Daisy.

"If the juju had meant us not to eat people, he wouldn't of made us of meat."

FTFY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGW-qnlrMjs

NASA: ALIENS and NEW EARTHS will be ours inside 20 years

P. Lee

Re: Promises, promises

> Oh yeh! Anyone else remember the "paperless office".

These days, its more of a question of who remembers a paper-run office with massive filing rooms? We may not be completely paperless, but where I work there isn't much of it around and its mostly used for proofing and signing.

The universe may be rather large, but it appears he hasn't done the stats on the probabilities of the evolution of life as we know it.

"20 years and there will be aliens"... AKA, "Funding Please!"

New leaked 'Windows 8 screenshot': The Start Menu strikes back

P. Lee

Re: Win 8.x?

> If 8.x is supposed to be a taster for win.9 (as I suspect it may be)

I don't think so. It's supposed to be a taster for windows mobile, one area where MS haven't saturated the market and therefore hope to gain new sales.

I discovered right-clicking the start button brings up a useful menu from the time that TIFKAM forgot. Actually, it looks a bit like a Win3.1 drop-down menu, so I'm not surprised that they want to theme it. However, a tile-themed menu sounds like something else I'm going to have to edit to fix.

New Doctor Who episode leaks online as proper trailer debuts

P. Lee

Re: Don't look Ethel!

Mooned 'er... right there in front of the home team!

Murdoch calls for ISPs to be liable for users' activities

P. Lee

I don't mind the idea

as long as media owners also become liable for the all the actions of their consumers.

And their employees too.

The Windows 8 dilemma: Win 8 or wait for 9?

P. Lee

Re: Boring

I've been running 8.1 for a couple of weeks. It is just a games machine, but I have some observations:

1. Things move. It isn't just different, its inconsistent. If I want to power off/sleep from the desktop I have to go bottom left, click on windows start-screen button. Then I have to move to the opposite corner (top right) for the power icon, then scroll down for the option I want. There's far to much movement.

Worse, sometime I've noticed that the power button comes up on the bottom right bleed-in panel.

2. pin to taskbar / icon on the desktop is a workaround for the start screen. I use this a lot. I did on Win7 too.

3. Start screen is full of MS rubbish. You have to delete all the MS junk from the start screen one at a time (no multi-select of icons appears to be available): select an icon, from somewhere on the screen, then click on the delete menu which just appeared (so you couldn't see where it was earlier and plan your mouse moves) at the bottom of the screen which is far too much mousing. There isn't even a rubbish bin shown to drop stuff straight into.

Then you have to replace the icons with useful stuff - control panel, explorer, Firefox :) and your other real apps. I shouldn't have to clean my environment on a fresh install - that just looks bad like pre-installed OEM crud. It's also tedious to remove and oh how I hate live tiles. It's like looking at a facebook page.

4. PC Settings. You'd think this might be the control panel. It isn't, it isn't that useful and it doesn't appear to have a link to the control panel. Where are my £$%^&* network settings? PC Settings is at the bottom on a right-side auto-hide panel along with some other stuff.

5. Menus/results. Right-side panel (lower) for some things, left side "start button (lower) on the desktop, almost top right for the start screen menu and search results. The menu's are all over the place with no apparent reasoning.

6. Going along with the theme. Click the start screen button (bottom left) and your apps appear not in the bottom left where your mouse is, but all over the screen - again far to much mousing. If I have a lot of apps and start typing in the application name, my filtered list appears in the opposite corner to where my mouse was. Yes I could use keyboard shortcuts but it's supposed to be a WIMP environment.

Or rather it isn't. This is a touchscreen, not mouse environment. Things are organised for fingers on opposite hands to be used in a coordinated fashion on a tablet-sized screen. It's rubbish for mouse-based operation on a 27' monitor.

Here's the difference between how Apple introduced IOS and how MS introduced Win8. With Apple, I was never left thinking "I don't know how to do X." Perhaps because it is an inherently simpler environment. With Win8 I'm constantly having to think how to get past the GUI to my applications or data.

Maybe its just my personality but I like structure, organisation and predictability. Search is a last resort when I've forgotten everything else or misplaced it. I don't want to be forced to search visually through a large screen of icons and neither do I want progressive search with its shifting icons and dynamic lists to be my main mode of access. Win7 search was fine, KDE search is fine, both attached to the start menu (and alt-F2 for kde). It feels like a desperate attempt to make windows cool by making it look as though "Windows just knows where everything is" rather than "I installed my app in that location and stored my data in that location."

MS needs to get over itself and concentrate on what it knows. By the time it's ready for mobile, mobile will be saturated and the market gone. Get some better local caching in Outlook so my laptop talking to the corporate mail server on the other side of the world doesn't spend ages trying to update its social media integration data. That would be nice.