moylan

i'm not saying your wrong. and i definitely agree this is aimed at average users. but it will put off a percentage of non average users. and those are often the users who recommend to average users what to use. i know i've stopped recommending apple hardware after a decade of doing so.

whether this affects apple negatively overall is the big question.

i'd rather a platform were i have to be careful to avoid malware rather than a platform were there is a single 'gateway' to what apps can be installed. how can that gateway ever be considered impartial in a for profit system?

app development on symbian used to be a chaotic affair till nokia brought in signed apps. after that the apps started to dry up. it became a hurdle for lone developers that wasn't worth the effort.

i'm sure apple would organise it better but it is still another hoop to be jumped through to get an app developed.

as to openess i still have an iphone 3g. i had the cash saved up for a prepay iphone 3gs and was to go and pick one up the following weekend when apple banned google voice. it was an indicator of control so i spent the cash instead on android. the iphone 3g will be my last purchase from apple thank you very much.

and ireland. and with all the companies from the usa here i suspect it'll be a popular purchase to save space in a bag.

i know i want one or three.

i'm beginning to think that the biggest problem may now be legal.

with a driver there is someone to get a signature/payment/paperwork whilest a driverless vehicle would need something else.

who's responsible for damage inside the back of a truck when it made 3-4 deleiveries?

how easy would it be to stop and steal the contents of one of these vehicles if it can be stopped on a quiet road with a rolling roadblock?

my brother has done 90% of his work on the road in many service/delivery jobs. he reckons at least here in ireland there will always need to be somebody on board to load/unload/handle paperwork/report problems . or if not need to be it might for a long time be cheaper to be.

it's tyre in ireland.

if it was just a grudge match between tesla and edison i could respect edison a little more. it is possible to get so obsessed that he would have a blind spot and go out of his way to engage a competitor. think steve jobs promising to go nuclear on android. but edison went out of his way to profit from the work of Georges Méliès. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon#Distributio...

the telegraph service western union turned down a chance to buy the patent for telephones as they thought it was merely a toy. it's still a custom in ireland to send telegrams for weddings, other than that...

facebook is merely a service that will exist till some better service comes along.

disclaimer. never had a facebook account.

the metallic dust does cause short circuits.

the office our pc was in was in an office built above the work floor and had very good ventelation but fine dust still made it up and on to every surface. once enough dust settled inside the pc it died.

it cannot be good for the humans there but still not the unhealtiest place i saw. that was a cabbies cubby were 20-30 taxi drivers sat waiting for jobs to come in and they seemed to all be chain smokers. the office was a converted shipping container with benches inside. a pc used for booking calls was brought in dead. when i opened it up there was a tarry goo on the motherboard and the fan was seized solid. after replacing the fan and sponging up as much of the goo as i could i went to clean the case. my boss asked if it was necessary so i took a sheet of a4 paper placed it on the metal case cover and smoothed it down. then i grabbed 2 corners of the paper and lifted the metal lid clear of the desk. the stickiness was pure tar. goodness knows how long the new fan lasted.

and as for what it did to the humans...

i wonder if the dust created by the bandsaw wouldn't make it difficult to replace it with a more modern system. we used to use standard office pcs to run a pos system for video shops around ireland. as the systems moved from been shipped with win 3.1 to win xp the processors got faster and the dust in the shops used to clog up the fans. machines pre pentium iii with passive cooling worked fine but anything with a cpu fan could be easily clogged with average dust levels in a pos location.

we also had a few pcs in engineering locations and even the power supply fans on 386s had problems with the dust in those locations. you have to wonder what the dust was doing to staffs lungs. after one particular location killed 1 pc a week for a month we ended up putting the pc in a pair of tights as this filtered out the dust. looked weird but far cheaper than a industrial pc.

but opera 3.62 seems to have support for css and works on win 3.1

haven't touched a win 3.1 system since around 2004 or so.

i always regret that i didn't take my parents valve radio when the house was cleared and sold over a decade ago. it was bulky, inefficient but worked perfectly. had a lot of fond memories of that radio as a kid. they got it as a wedding present in the early sixties. the valves would eventually need replacing but there are still places selling the parts if you know where to go.

but my favourite bike as a kid in the late 70s and early 80s was a bsa bike that had been built in the early forties. that thing was a tank. it's probably still out there in use every day. completely indestrucible with a little light maintenance.

now however things are not built to last. ignoring electronics or computers which date fast. casettes, vcrs. analog mobiles 8bit, 16bit and now even 32bit computers are edging towards obsolescence for desktop use. a crappy tin opener still needed for those tins still sold without a prestressed ring pull will die in less than a decade. the bullhead tin opener in my parents kitchen seems to have been one of the first types sold in the late 19th century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BullOpener.png

i like to think that growing up with ancient hardware gave me an appreciation for well designed and easy to maintain items. i try to avoid flashy insubstantial items.

so unless there has been a giant leap in a.i. we'll need a licence to access a site about scunthorpe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

i hate unity. it's nothing but distracting eye candy. a non standard waste of resources. but i like ubuntu overall so at the mo i use xubuntu. suits all my needs without unity.

but ubuntu is still an organisation to support especially in terms of them helping produce hardware that will be 100% linux compatible no matter what distro i choose to run.

i'd rather pay an ubuntu tax than a microsoft tax so i really look forward to buying a new machine with the option of ubuntu even if it costs a little more.

but my main concern will be the those who buy an ubuntu machine and then expect to run ms office or other windows only piece of software on it. i will be getting those calls. thankfully most of the home users aren't as dependent on windows only apps anymore.

in 2008 nokia was a far superior phone. in europe anyway. they really seem to have had no impact in the usa. my nokias back then had nice useable keyboards, decent cameras that shot video, cameras with flashes. been able to write code on the os in python, and incredible battery life. a good selection of apps.

but phones they made in 2008 suggested problems to me (only supporting 8gb memory, bad design decisions for connectors) and by early-mid 2009 they had caused enough people to ditch nokia for android that the writing was on the wall.

i bought a iphone 3g on prepay and it was meh till ios 3 came along. the people who asked about the iphone i could show them the device and even loan it to them. after using it for a few days none of them wanted it at 1/3 of it's price. battery life was appalling after using nokias till that point. many hated the touchscreen for typing sms as it was slower and less accurate. accidently tapping the weather or any other internet app caused the device to suck data costing money on the prepay device.

so when the 3gs came out and apple blocked googles voip app i bought an android device. have been on android since. but i still have an ancient nokia e61 as emergency backup. last used a few weeks ago when in hospital and got seperated from my chargers. used the e61 which had last been charged last year and had been switched off since then for 3 days no problem.

massive solar eruptions capable of destroying humanity are covered in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunstorm_(novel)

good book. i liked how the emergency services, military and police were using ancient pre electronic ground vehicles as they were the only ones that could survive or operate in such conditions.

i use llama on my android devices to turn on wifi only in places where it knows and turn it off else where. saves power too that way.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kebab.Llam...

didn't the soviets gain much of their information from american citizens? so i'm sure that many such agencies will simply recruit citizens from the country they wish to spy on. such changes in security practices as this will only change the number of people recruited.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Soviet_agents_in_the_U...

aertel is still going for the mo. and you can see the pages on the web. which is handy for when the web is on a go slow.

http://www.aertel.ie/aertel/

tvs with teletext cost about £20-30 more last time i bought a tv but you got the money back in savings on buying tv guides as you could use teletext for the listings.

when it comes to surveillance the british have a history of intercepting communications.

like intercepting most phone traffic from ireland using a legal loophole from 1985. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/may/31/northernireland.ric...

so fingers crossed the british public make their government back down but i wouldn't believe that it would stop them.

i thought it was to buy nokias patents at a knock down price later.

perhaps a folding bike? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brompton_Bicycle

not cheap but easily transportable indoors and out. you can store it by your desk in a bag. i see them all over dublin as it's cheaper ultimately to keep your bike by your side than lock them in a public place. and also been brought on public transport.

here in ireland most schools and libraries has an apple ii. but they were expensive fragile things that nobody understood or touched. when the c64 came out our school got 6 linked to one floppy drive. we went nuts over them. but when it came to a my first computer i went with a zx spectrum as most of my friends had one as it was slightly cheaper.

in my class of 24 or so. 3-4 spectrums, 1-2 c64s and 1 amstrad (poor sod, great computer, few users so few software swaps available)

i bought a sony walkman radio in the early 80s. still have it, use it every day, use it in the bathroom where it is subject to hot and humid conditions. it's now over a quarter of a century old and works fine.

in the 80s the build quality of sony was legendary. in the 90s they were still excellent and most people i know preferred them over an alternate brand. but minidiscs and even before that d.a.t. showed they preferred a locked down environment that favoured sony and not their customers. mp3s were the nail in the coffin for many folk that i know and people went elsewhere. i stopped recommending sony back in late 90s. cd and dvd burners speeded up the process when sony products refused to handle them.

the rootkits, lies and lack of security were just nails in the coffin.

first i saw about non newtonian liquids was a british science entertainment show.

and about a year afterwards they began talking about using the same as armour. just stuck in my mind as the kids show came first.

from 2003. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkS1ymQ73oc&feature=relat...

from 2004. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/science-fiction-news.asp?newsn...

and there we run into the problem of one size fits all design. you hate the stylus and i prefer them. it comes down to what you are using your mobile tech for.

with the psions keyboards i could get 30-40 wpm typing. with a stylus i was down to around 20wpm. typing on touch screens is a chore and stuggles approach 20wpm.

but with stylus i also had the option of doodling info on screen. at higher resolution than a finger can achieve. i could get signatures, scribble a hasty note in freehand.

i don't think it should be a requirement but rather an option. but without the option i would lose interest towards a device that has a stylus option. but even then i prefer a keyboard more and currently use a samsung galaxy pro.

i had stylus with psions and several palms and palm clones. over 10 years of use and never lost a single stylus. make a standard stylus and it becomes easy to keep a spare in your bag.

that is one of the goals of the reprap project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap#Construction

fingers crossed they get there.

but the stylus available for android and iphones are horrible (at least the 2-3 i've tried).

my sharp zaurus had a neat learning mode which allowed me to teach it graffiti.

one of the main reasons i gave up palm (had a iiix, iiic, visor neo, m125 and palm e) was when they moved to graffiti 2 due to the lawsuit as it's accuracy was less no matter how much time i spent with it.

i was thinking more along the lines of keyboard based android devices. rim have shown they can build heavyduty hardware that can take a lot of punishment.