Posts by Chairo

Maintenance failure?

they outsourced their cloud to the cloud? And that could was outsourced to the cloud? And ...

As usual - Adobe's customers...

have been gimped.

Anything

that stops Malaria is a good thing. Unfortunately most of the parts of the world that are rampaged by this pest are quite poor, so there is no good return of investment. A cheap and readily available vaccine would be really, really important.

Good luck to them!

Excellent marketing at work

Apple saw that people rather buy the 5s instead of the 5c, even though the differences in spec are marginal. So it is only logical to push the price for their top model up. It's just good product placement.

It might also have to do with the premium, the carriers enforced on their customers by pricing LTE deals significantly higher and at the same time outphasing 3G models. (At least in the country where I live - and no, they don't accept 3G only contracts for LTE capable phones). Apple naturally wants their slice of the loot.

If this works out, people with smaller budgets or people that want a compact phone will go for the 5c and the rest will probably swallow the 6.

Microsoft is still busy

polishing their turd. When will they finally understand, that alienating your customers is generally a bad idea? (that is a rhetoric question)

Adding features that compare well against IOS and Android is kind of laughable for a desktop OS. Doesn't anybody at Microsoft understand, that their grand vision for the future is a bad joke, at best?

All of you said it cannot be done

but Microsoft went ahead and proved you wrong.

They polished a toad!

Bees are no challenge

I dare him to use Japanese giant hornets next time. Or perhaps bullet ants.

Dr Andrew Przybylski of Oxford?

Also known as A.O.?

Why not earlier?

Brilliant! They can squeeze out some more years of work from existing hardware, support local software shops, that provide the distribution and if they go for a XP-like window manager like XFCE, they don't even retrain their people a lot.

The question is, if they can pull it off in such a short lead time? I think they are at least one year too late. Of course it depends on what they use their PCs for. If all applications are browser based, hosted on a central server, and perhaps a bit of local office suite usage for writing letters, it might even work.

Anyway - whatever OS they choose, they will be more or less in the same situation.

"this one is a maker of exoskeleton “suits” and supports designed to help those with serious muscular, nerve or cerebral damage recover movement."

They would say that, wouldn't they?

Accomplishments?

"Our agreement with Dell shows what can be accomplished when companies share intellectual property,"

Entry barriers for start ups, blocking competing technology, extorting fees for widely formulated trivial patents - and not least of all, an ecosystem of lawyers that feast on the whole mess.

I thought SCO already proved this point?!?

We are not spying on you, honestly

... we wrote the letter during lunch break, so technically it is true.

Past ice ages?

past ice ages – the most recent of which ended less than 20,000 years ago

Who says the ice age is over? Technically we are just in a interglacial period. The ice could come back any time soon. (Soon being relative - when we are talking about geological time scales).

Mine's the thick one with hot-water bottles in the pockets.

@Nick Ryan - "they do have a habit of stitching up the older devices"

It became a little bit less nasty, lately. They used to stop supporting older devices pretty fast until now, but a few days ago I was very surprised to see an update for Skype in the App Store, when I opened it with my old 3G model, running IOS4. I thought I try out what happens and it actually offered me the last available version for my flavour of IOS for installation. Quite a big surprise! I checked out some other apps that are now "unavailable for your version of IOS", and unfortunately there was no change. I suppose it is up to the developer to support this feature.

Still - better than the outright ignorance of older devices they showed before.

Gingerbread?

Does anyone know, why they chose Gingerbread? Quite an odd design choice!

Otherwise it sounds like an interesting idea to use e-ink.

What saved apple's bacon

is the carriers' stupidity. At least here in Japan. If you take an IPhone on a 2 years mobile contract, it is about 500yen (~£3) per month cheaper than if you choose Android, - with the exactly same conditions. (They don't offer any windows phones, btw). Japanese carriers also offer generous cash-backs, if you take an IPhone. You could nearly buy a new IPhone from the money I was offered, just this weekend.

No doubt they contracted for huge volumes and got surprised that their fellow carriers did exactly the same. As a result they dump them and the cheapest Android is still much more expensive on a contract than even the IPhone 5s.

I wonder how to call this - war for Apple share? Apple war? Anyway, as long as it lasts there will be enough work for Foxconn, I suppose.

"dinosaurs didn't have a space program" – and look what happened to them

They evolved into birds and flew away?

On a more serious note - make a boinc client that searches for non matches on photographic data and let it loose on the internet. People will happily donate their computing time and the electricity would be much better invested than for coin mining.

Progress is marching on...

stomping over everything in it's way.

At least it's cutting edge technology. As next step I propose to build some water treatment facilities.

- What do you mean: "the water is already poisoned, anyway"?

If it is sold for $49 in the US and £49 in the UK, will they sell it for 49 Yen in Japan?

Mine is the one with all those wallets in the pocket...

My first PDA

was a Agenda VR3, back in 2001. I was impressed by the OS (it was Linux based, rock stable, lots of open source ports and synced OK with outlook) but disgusted with the mediocre hardware.

My second PDA was a ASUS A600. I was impressed by the hardware (lots of RAM, fast ARM processor, colour display), but not so much by the software. PocketPC 2002. What? No writing back data to the flash? All data lost, once the battery is empty? Outlook syncing only over "active sync", which had a nasty habit of messing up my contact list?

I thought Microsoft would surely catch up quickly, after all everything had been done before. Then came a row of PocketPC incarnations that had only one thing in common - they looked, felt and worked pretty much all the same and were unavailable for my poor not so old PDA, anyway. That they changed the name to "Windows Mobile", in case it was used as a telephone OS, didn't change much, either.

I wonder how it is possible to neglect a market for such a long time? It probably takes a very concious effort. I can imagine a bunch of clueless top managers sitting in a meeting room with meta-plan boards around them, filled with phrases like "minimalise efforts", "concentrate development on core business", "follow the vision", ...

That famous video of Ballmer, laughing off the IPhone tells one thing for certain. Microsoft thought smartphones are a low margin, commodity business. You know what - that might even be true for 90% of the market. He just didn't see these 10% that are willing to pay big money.

Less secure than what?

So how does this make open software less secure? With a closed sourced software this bug would probably go unpatched for just as long or longer. As an added bonus you then depend on the goodwill of some company to fix it in a reasonable time frame and for the software version you are using.

A bug in a library? Good luck, finding out, which of your closed source software uses this library and is affected.

The best part

was that the Japanese police already pressed confessions out of some of the innocents they arrested.

They seem to be very committed to their work - quite frightening...

Troll types

I wonder what kind of different troll types there are.

Up to now I identified 3 types:

- The foam in the mouth "my system is best" type

- The offensive re-poster of the same sentence, depending on the headline (usually AC)

- The accuser (everyone with another opinion is a corporate shill)

I suppose there must be much more. Any suggestions?