Posts by JeffyPooh

Tablets, even expensive ones, are not really expensive

Compare a (wifi only) tablet to a mobile phone: the phone costs a zillion times more due to the monthly fees. A wifi tablet is a simple one-time purchase costing more than a good bottle of wine but perhaps a bit less than one good tire. You can drop the idiot fanboi approach and just buy one of each - thereby gaining access to multiple App Eco-systems (best thing ever!).

Apologies in advance to those that are forced to choose only one or the other and are thus trapped within a single eco-system. It must be awful.

Step 1 - Calculate your organization's free cash

Step 2 - Send it all to SAP.

It's not the slightest bit confusing.

Good Test Equipment

I think that they should get back to their core competency: audio oscillators.

Ack. Ack ack ack.

As above.

Be more savage...

By way of recent example, the iPad Mini should be ravaged for its many (trivial) defects and omissions. Its screen should be compared with the State of the Art and given a 45% rating. The (missing) GPS should be worth 5 points deduction. It ends up with a mark in the 65% 'Hey Apple, You Can Do Better' range and a recommendation to wait for the /2 version.

Another example is the Google Nexus 4, it gets an overall rating of 'zero' because it doesn't actually exist.

Windows 8 and the Surface fiasco would be a 500-pg review (listing all the defects and daft decisions) and a rating of about 85%, less about 1,500,000% for them being thick.

Basically follow the example of Jeremy Clarkson's car reviews. Make them opinionated and funny, with some good details and comparisons along the way. Accuracy is not essential. Don't limit your ratings to 0-100, negative a million or positive 110 are valid.

"Pssst! Hey, you wanna buy an iPad Mini? Only $200."

It's still: 'no thanks'.

PS: Call me when you've stolen a pallet of iPad Mini *2*.

Lock-in LOL

Once upon a time, Nokia had a firm lock on the market. Then the BlackBerrys were The Thing with their BBM stranglehold on the thumb pressing addicts. Then Apple became the dominant Smartphone and held the wide-eyed reality distortion field members in a locked-up walled ecosystem. But then Android offered an escape away from Apple and straight into the "evil empire" of our Googley Overlords. 18 months from now some unknown Asian manufacturer will create something so amazing, so new and so different that it'll make Android 6.3 look like old socks.

"Lock-in..." ...Yeah right.

Did it come gift wrapped in a riddle?

Gungf nybgb szbar lsben abyqo bkbso vgfxx

Blue Dwarf

It's a new class of object that I hereby name "Blue Dwarf".

Hopefully 'blue dwarf' isn't the name of a pr0n subgenre.

File... Options... Select GUI...

It's really obvious that there should be one constant anchor that never disappears (except during media playback and similar, of course), and behind that is the option to select any of dozens of different GUI choices.

The stupidest mistake on Earth is Microsoft failing to realize that Windows 8 could have shipped with a half-dozen GUI options, from Windows 7 look-alike to Windows 8 Metro-for-morons to whatever else people might want.

Balmer needs to study the word "transition". Daft idiots.

Win 8 / Metro GUI - is it a joke?

I'm not saying that Microsoft is plotting some sort of stock buy-back, and Windows 8 (specifically the a pencil-in-the-eye would be better Metro GUI) is part of the plan to slash the stock price by 30% when sales of Windows 8 fail to materialize, but if it was... ...what would be different?

c

Presumably going around takes a bit longer than going straight. Therefore this technique will not work as-is with broadband illumination (visible light).

Multipath results in reinforcement and cancellation that varies with frequency. Scale this technique to visible light frequencies (and non-infinitesimal cloaked volumes) and it'll be a freaking light show with a comb like spectrum.

Still discovering the basics...

That's good. I wonder what's the percentage of what they now know compared to what was? Is it 50%, or 0.005%? Has anyone even estimated this ratio? I suspect it's much lower than anyone might think.

The point being: the overly detailed descriptions of what was going on way back then must be inaccurate.

Wal*Mart = Mall*Wart

Low low prices.

In the case of Apple products, often $0.12 cheaper (e.g. $599.83 instead of $599.99).

Yeah, thanks.

Has anyone owned a New Beetle for more than 2-3 years?

Everyone I know that bought one, moved on to another car fairly quickly.

Simple solution...

The pissed-off court seizes the entire Apple.co.uk domain for 90-days. The court then hires someone that can find the Save As... HTML command in MS-Word. The court posts up whatever they want.

What about all the sub genres that start with the letter 'c' ?

As above.

Daft Decision Making at MS lately

What they should have done is migrate Messenger into a skinned version of Skype. Boil the frogs slowly, everyone is happy. Best of both worlds with near-zero cost. Duh.

What they've done is daft. Not as utterly daft as the entire Win 8 fiasco, but still daft.

They need to add a 'Decision Inverter' to their internal Decision Making processes. Keep everything the same, just invert all decisions as the last step before implementation. This one easy change will instantly improve their decision making from 80% bad to 80% good.

Sigh...

The root cause of the Apple Antennagate fiasco is as follows: A monopole antenna has a low impedance feed point at one end. The other end is open circuit, and thus very high impedance. You don't want to touch the high impedance end because (being high impedance) it'll be maximally sensitive at that point.

E-ballots

E-ballots worked just fine in our local elections. Our new mayor was elected in a landslide with a huge margin of 7,862,783,873,256 votes.

Uh, wait a second...

"...could have their accounts killed off permanently."

I read somewhere that it was "impossible" to completely and permanently delete a Twitter account. I'm happy to see that there's now an easy method to achieve the impossible.

Apple's reply will be...

"You're holding it wrong. Turn your tablet back to the approved Portrait mode."

IR Countermeasures

Cameras are sensitive to near-IR (camcorder a TV remote control to demo). It'd be next to trivial to equip theatres with IR LEDs to confound camcorders. Obviously it would be unleashed for the climax of the plot.

SAP = LOL disasters.

Chair, popcorn.

Apple: "You MUST have Retinal display!"

How about a GPS chip?

How about the latest processor?

How about an iPhone 5 aspect ratio?

No sale.

Where is the GPS chip again?

Just wondering...