Posts by ZweiBlumen 62 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2011
"Which is the major WTF moment for me, but they wanted to keep the standard 'simple' for all those people migrating away from geocities obviously."
No, they wanted to stop website from returning a yellow screen of XML death just because some web author somewhere forgot to close a break tag. Whilst XHTML is great it's not at all suitable for publishing content on the web.
I think the idea was to do away with version numbers. It will have the same doctype as will all future versions. The thinking being that HTML is a living spec or something which can accomodate for future changes without making older pages break. No idea if this is good, bad or irrelevant....
Not weird at all.... they've seen the way Apple make a fortune through iTunes and want a bit of the same pie (actually of a different pie). And if you ask me, as a professional freelancer, paying $100 a year for access to Microsoft's entire office suite whenever and wherever I need it is a pretty good deal. Of course if you're just using it to write letters to your parents, then just stick with Open Office.
In fact I fully agree with Tatsky above. For the casual user (most Windows users) the ribbon aids discovering functions much more than a normal menu. It's also great for learning shortcuts as pressing the ALT key clearly displays a letter over each button. So to insert a table you simply press:
ALT
n
t
i
in that order without having to hold down multiple keys. This is so much easier to use than various CTRL-ALT or CTRL-SHIFT shortcuts. I am far more productive with the Ribbon than without it.
Fair enough for power users it means re-learning a load of stuff. That, unfortunately, is the lot of the power user. For the casual user, the Ribbon is great.
Fully agree with your analysis.
But the reason Microsoft is going down this route is because it has been so successful for Apple and Apple appear to be going down that route for their laptops. Obviously these gated communities are a bad thing for the consumer/end user, but Apple have shown the way.
I can clearly see a time in the next 5 years where you don't buy Office anymore. You simply pay a yearly licence to use it. Nor will there be different versions of Office (2010, 2012 etc). The software you use will simply upgrade as long as you pay the licence. For Microsoft this will be great: guaranteed yearly revenue from 100s of millions of Office users. Further with no way to stay on Office 2003 their support headaches might reduce. And far less pirated software. For some entereprise users this might also be good: all their clients will have the same software! For the end user/consumer: not so sure. Could be good if the licences are not prohibitive and you are a regular Office user. Perhaps MS will throw in a free Surface with your first year's subscription! But in the long run it again means lack of real choice.
Perhaps they *might* like to consider breaking the work down into *smaller* packages and not using this "£10m/yr over a decade equals £100m. We can't have *any* one on the bid list with a net worth of less than £100m" b***cks.
Absolutely. I'm convinced a committed bunch of freelancers or micro-SMEs (or whatever the term is for a 5 staff company) could do a better and significantly cheaper job than most of these over paid consultancies. In a 5 man shop EVERYONE is committed 100% of the time. In big coorporations you're paying overheads for things that simply don't need to be. Too much talk going on, not enough real work.
I don't agree that FB users will move on. It's too big for that now. It's like saying Google can be supplanted in search. Theoretically yes, in practice no. On top of that FB has become the defacto authorization mechanism on the web. So many sites now require a Facebook account. FB is firmly here to stay. That doesn''t mean it's valued at stupid amounts or that they can profit as much as they hope from their users.
But Facebook is big, real big. And most of it's user base don't have the privacy concerns that the more technical readership of TheRegister does. In fact Facebook has replaced Google as their starting point to the web...
"I think it may be the signal to noise thing."
Well, yes, if only you and your best mate are in your circle on G+ then there won't be much noise. My Facebook stream on the other is full of "spam" from friends of mine who are serial posters. I've had to turn off their updates. It's also full of spam from updates to groups I follow. Facebook need to come up with a better way of dealing with this. Unless I have missed something.
You're confusing design with function. Apple may have 1001 functional patents which were truly innovative stuffed into their iPad. But how on earth they got a design patent on their iPad is beyond. Me it is simply not distinctive AT ALL. You put a Coca Cola coke bottle next to a Tesco coke bottle and they are quite different. But what Apple have come up with just rather non-distinctive.
The Truth is the USPO patents everything and asks questions later. It's good business for them!
Double D'oh.
My thoughts exactly. How on earth did Apple ever get a design patent on such a generic non-distinctive design. It's not like there is no prior art of tablet like gadgets that are rectangular with rounded corners.
Patents are supposed to require a creative non-obvious step. How is the iPad shape anything other than ordinary?
If I were Samsung I would start shipping my thrid quality processors to Apple. That'll shut them up.
Why do you care whether you pay your shiny pennies to Facebook, Apple, Google or even Microsoft (ha!) as part of app promotion? They are all just companies trying to maximise their profits. They are all equally evil, bad, good, innocent, corrupt thieving monopolies - or whatever.
(Or are you giving your apps away completely for free?)
These might be the rules, they are not however the laws governing investments. Once again it seems like the large investment banks have simply ignored and broken the laws. They do this all the time. Every. Single. Day. They are so full of gangsters it is shocking. They caused the current crisis through lies and deceipt. Yet not one of them is in jail.
If you get caught walking down the street with an ounce of marijuana you go to jail. Yet top execs and investers are known to be snorting cocaine as if it were a decongestant and not one of them has had face a court about this.
The financial world is worse than any mafia on this planet. They should ALL be in jail. They are not because doing so would involve too many politicians and others in positions of power.
Better go and live in the Republic of Wadiya...
They missed the boat because they are too tied to the desktop, and specifically backwards compatibility. If instead of trying to bend Windows into a phone/tablet OS they had developed a brand new OS they might have been better off.
The other, real, problem, is that they are just not "cool enough" for early adopters. Even if they had delivered a decent smartphone a few years it would have failed because the early adopter consumer types had already sold into the Apple empire. I mean Balmer vs Jobs? Gates was at least a techy at heart even if he lacked the charisma of Jobs. But Balmer? How did he last more than 2 years in that position? He should have been fired the moment the iPod came out and Windows had nothing to counter.
In my opinion, I think MS need to think a couple of steps ahead now. Forget about iPads and smartphones. Instead focus on what comes after that. Because in 5 years time tablets and smartphones will be commodity items that every man and his dog owns. No one will care whether yours is an iPhone, S2 or Lumina. It'll just be a gadget. Microsoft actually have lots of interesting projects on the go but they never seem to understand how to market them.
I actually think Google have a long way to go before they can claim there myriad of services are truly integrated. Connected perhaps, but not integrated.
Wilst they've made big strides in this recently it's still far from perfect. I have use many different services from Google, but other than a common login many of them are completely separate. Language settings being one REALLY annoying "feature" that Google as simply yet to solve.
Probably because the Pound seems to be devaluing all the time. You can't devalue by 25% and not expect imports to go up by roughly the same amount.
Is it really the resellers that are complaining? Probably. But MS are also loosing 25% of their revenue compared to 5 years ago when you look at the $/£ exchange rate. Of course MS would rather blame the resellers than themselves.
All those going on about AdBlock. That's NOT the point. The point is the information they collect about you and who has access to that information.
Given an 18 month search history it is quite possible to determine EXACTLY who that person is, including where they live, their name, phone number and so on. This happened a few years back when AOL "accidentally" published their "anonymous" search data. Some old biddy in god knows where was rather taken aback when a reporter contacted her saying she'd searched for "viagra side effects" on the 16th March 2008 or whenever. The reporter determined all this purely from the search history, not IP addresses (which had been anonoymised) or anything else.
On the other hand, that's also because Apple won't let anyone else sell an iOS based phone. Why? Because they would eat into Apple's market share rather than Android's. So whilst it is true that it is one company against many companies, the issue is really about platforms and therefore about Apple vs Google.
Google are doing to Apple in the smartphone business what Microsoft did to IBM in the desktop business. The difference in this battle is not Google/Microsoft. But Apple/IBM. Apple has a large enough consumer fan base to be able to stay the course. I firmly believe Apple will loose quite a chunk of their market share in the coming years, whilst still growing and increasing profits. The market is still in its infancy.
Well said Sir!
There's so much more to running an IT infrastructure than simply the cost of the software. In fact I would guess the NHS has done the Math (well being the NHS this may not be true) and decided that as an overall part of it's IT budget paying for Software or getting it free - doesn't make much difference.
It's not just retraining the end user in using Libre Office. What do you do with all the trained up MS network admins who then have to retrain to use Linux. It costs thousands (millions even) for the NHS just to keep these guys trained up in MS tech. They need their costly certificates as you can't let an uncertified admin anywhere near a network with patient information on it.
Then there are the 3rd party suppliers. It's not for no reason that the NHS is still stuck on IE6. All those extra Active-X plugins JUST WORK. Move to any other browser (even IE9) and they need to be retested.
Then there is the web infrastructure which in the NHS almost exclusively uses .Net and Sharepoint and so on.
The list goes on and on.
And don't for a second think that an organisation the size of the NHS, with the purchasing price is paying anywhere near the published price of the software. I would expect discounts of over 50%.
In fact the only crime the NHS is performing is that they are paying for MS software at all. MS make so much money out of 3rd party suppliers to the NHS that the NHS should be getting their software for free!
but not the truth. It was basically the avionic on this Airbus that landed the plane safely. Which is not to discredit the pilot for acting appropriately, but this landing was as good an advert for fly by wire as there will ever be. It's just that people need a real hero, like a pilot, not some boring, faceless, aerospace engineering team.
So a CEO on $100m a year is like 3000 times more useful than the workers who work in his company? You really believe that there is anybody on this planet who is even 10 times more useful than someone else?
Pay has nothing anymore to do with usefulness, responsibility or ability, especially not at the CEO level. It is purely do to with how much you can screw out of your employer.
"Without the bandwidth charges there is no way to compare the costs - they could just as well be free and charge the earth to read and write"
Yes and no. Depends what your business model is. If you running an online backup service for example, then bandwidth costs won't come into it much (how often do users download their backups).
@N2
"Its a telephone, if you dont like it, dont buy it."
No it isn't, I can't install Angry Birds on my landline phone.
About the last thing anyone does on a smartphone is make a phonecall in the traditional sense. Not saying they don't make calls, but updating your Facebook page, reading your Twitter stream and uploading photos is not making a call.
What I fail to understand in this whole saga is that Apple are essentially suing Samsung because their tablet LOOKS too much like the iPhone. How can you patent the look of something? Shouldn't the case be about copyright?
I would really appreciate someone explaining the patents that are being applied here and what they cover. God save us all it is boils down to Samsung's tablet essentially being black with rounded corners or what have you.
XP only became good after SP2. What you are really saying is: " I like the way my XP works and don't want to change that so I won't upgrade". This is fine, but you can't say that W7 should function the same as XP. It's 10 years younger, things move on. I've upgraded all my systems to W7 and it rocks. It is also fast and lean as you put it. It runs just fine on my 5 year old cheapo Dell laptop which still has the sticker "designed for XP, Vista capable" on it.
Actually: do you trust yourself to do this?
Are you a security expert? A network specialist? If not, do you hire someone? And do you trust them MORE than an outfit how specialises in just this.
Of course it's all about trust. But if I'm going to trust someone with MyData I might prefer it to be an experienced hosting company than the little shop down the street, let alone myself.
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