randomhunt

I travel on a train for a medium length journey 2-4 times a week. In the last 12 months I've noticed that the transition from never seeing a Surface (Pro) to seeing 5-10% of tablets being a Surface (Pro). The vast majority are iPads still but its interesting that Surface has made such inroads. Based on what I see the main reason is the combination of the keyboard and Outlook.

I'm well aware that Skype did not change for the better after MS took over

While I'm acutely aware of the negative impact various changes had on privacy, cf the leaked documents referencing it, however I'm not sure that statement is blanketly true.

I can now have Skype running on my phone where previously it used to drain the battery in a few hours flat. That is, personally, a huge improvement.

Another thing I've noticed is I get both better video quality (when I use video, I prefer audio only) and I get less disconnects due to "network" reasons.

I only use Windows 10 in a VM for browser testing but I just disable the Windows Update service. I have a PowerShell script which can enable it, hang around and disable it again later which I use when I want to do updates, i.e. when I'm not busy focusing on a task.

I guess it will slightly reduce the overall security but as I only use it as a VM and am generally testing locally its an acceptable trade off in my opinion. The reason I set it up this way was to avoid the time sinks that come from when I do use Windows and then have to wait an age for updates to be done when I'm focusing on work. Previously I always used the option to be notified about updates rather than auto install which was a reasonable trade off. I understand why Microsoft made the change but I strongly disagree with it.

The real and politically-incorrect reason for the higher prices is that the cost of doing business is higher in Australia. For example, the minimum wage is very high and consumer protection laws require the company to provide a 2-year warranty at no additional cost.

I wonder what the price differential between Australia and Europe is, at similar points in time, then as these 2 example reasons also apply within Europe. Such a comparison might go some way to explaining if there are structural reasons, as suggested by these specific examples, or if it is simply price gouging.

I'm hoping that Android gets a lot better on the battery usage before that happens in earnest though. I've read they've focused on this recently but I haven't had time to drill into details.

I love Windows Phone and have had 3 different models since Windows Phone 7. I'm currently on a Lumia 830 for my private phone and get about 3.5-4 days of battery life. Granted I don't call/text a lot relying on email, Lync and Skype. My previous Lumia 520 was about the same, and the previous LG E900 was 2.5-3 days.

My partner has a Moto G (1st Generation) and loves it but only gets about 1-1.5 days of battery life. Good phone, similar price levels after offers on the Lumia 830, but dramatically lower battery life.

In Belgium BASE, which is owned by KPN, do a reasonable deal compared to the others with BASE 0. Its technically a monthly invoiced plan but works as a pay as you go card - you only get charged for what you use. Its basically the same price as any of the "outside the bundle" costs for their other plans. If you either use phone calls/internet/text infrequently or highly variable it's very interesting.

https://www.base.be/en/mobile/monthly-plans/base-0.html

Interestingly also in Belgium there is legal requirement that the phone company evaluates your bill every X months and notifies you if you could save money by moving to a different plan. Invariably I used to always be recommended BASE 0 due to my highly variable usage.

I think the UK had a similar thing from O2 but I don't remember if it was a legal requirement. It could be a European thing.

"It's evident from watching these that he is almost without exception the smartest person in every room he's in."

Careful...your "idealogical function [is] leaking through"...

Perhaps re: HN, and if so I apologise for confusion, but for Ninite it's CouldFront (d3doxs0mwx271h.cloudfront.net).

I spent a short while investigating if there was an easy way to get it working but ended up just giving up on the site.

Please don't go to Cloudfront, it's truly horrendous (wearing my end user hat) to see so many sites have problems and timeouts because of them.

For example Ninite.com moved to them and now the site is virtually unusable because of it, over 90% of the time I get a "403: Forbidden" error when trying to do anything...like send them feedback on how the website doesn't work...

I even see more HN problems this week and I'm sure its because of them.

Wouldn't it be ironic if both the established newspaper brand and the Q&A site both used Google advertising...

Don't you think Win9x would _scream_ on your GS3 though? ;-)

QNX?

In The Netherlands a lot have migrated to Nokia Windows Phones. KPN have been doing some very good deals which make the phones free and the contract prices very competitive with a guarantee of a new phone yearly if you migrate from their BlackBerry business packages.

The right tool for the job. I wouldn't try to cut a piece of wood to length by using a hammer.

Declarative languages tend to lend themselves to being used at a much higher level, for example easily encoding rules regarding salary payments rather than low level bit twiddling.

I'm impressed by your ability to ignore good advice and common sense.

I presume you haven't been in an organisation where all the hot new things come in and screw things up with this kind of thinking?

In general you just get that lot trained when the next wave are incoming...

Google has always done this, if really always felt like they're so smug they know better than you. I've been complaining about it for well over a decade, and the reason is I travel a lot for business and hit exactly the problems you describe. It was the main impetus to move beyond Google's garden.

There is the "ncr" workaround for some of their idiotness but it doesn't always work. I was sad to see Bing copy this cancer "feature" as well a few years ago.

The fact they're using Google's attempt to bid for the patents originally against them is even worse

That's just lawyering 101...it's a very common thing to do to try and add "weight" to your arguments is to say the opposition was aware of the "value"

Microsoft consumer product support is indeed utter crap, but I've found their developer support amazingly good.

We had a weird issue with something on Azure, raised the issue and got not only somebody very knowledgeable replying quickly who pointed us in the right direction but also had the docs updated a day or two later.

Contrast to the utter crap "support" we got when an IntelliPoint update had a fight with the Alps software on Dell Latitude laptops and randomly triggered a gazillion consecutive UAC elevation prompts. After being told by "support" for the third time to do something stupid like disable UAC or turn it off and on again we just nuked IntelliPoint from orbit and voila, problem fixed. The next update of IntelliPoint fixed the issue so I'm sure someone managed to report it correctly.

Yeah I had the same, I figured out it was more the acceleration that was the problem rather than the cursor movement itself...moving slower than usual meant I could use it without problems.

I did exactly the same! The Moving Truck icon is inspired...Photoshop could learn a few things ;-)

I thought one of the changes in later versions of PowerShell was there is now an internal version of wget? I know when I use the gnu one I have use specify "wget.exe" instead of "wget" (Invoke-WebRequest) but I can't remember when I started having to. Windows 8 perhaps?

Maybe he's thinking of the Daily Mail? [1]

[1] http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=stree...

Any idea how you're going to release it? (productise/monetize or open source)

I hacked up in the past a temporary solution using PowerPoint running on stripped down older laptops in the foyer and outside meeting rooms in my old company which worked well but I always thought it was a bit overkill and would like to see something like R-Pi in those kind of uses. I imagine yours is a lot more powerful but still think it would be a good use.

Really? I would have thought the group of people taking this rather capitalist route would not be reading a left leaning newspaper like The Guardian.

For example its obvious you don't, otherwise you would realise The Guardian has been banging on about the cost of London for donkey's years (at least 20) and against the bubbles of buy to let. I remember lots of stories flogging against it as the journalists were complaining they couldn't afford to live in London.

Their also complaining against the current schemes the UK Government which Gideon is pushing regarding mortgage guarantees and everybody (whether in the UK or not, whether working in banking or not) is saying will just create another bubble along the lines of buy to let.

Doesn't that save a version with screwed up formatting though? e.g. logo in the headers missing

Many years ago towards the beginning of my career proper in technology I first came across the phrase "the September that never ended." Asking a close grey beard he chuckled, explained poetically about newsgroups and finished with the anecdote that when he first started his career he had come across a similar phrase, asked a similar question and thus the cycle was complete.

Yeah this was what I was hoping for as well. Does anybody know when its likely to be released?

Yeah his reviews are very good. I do feel it would be nice to have a bit of a comparison section at the end though, to discuss some of the more technical details within the operating system landscape. For example timer coalescing/race to sleep is something I know Windows 8 has and I assume Linux, and the App Nap sounds like a more advanced version of the Metro tombstoning, and I think Linux can do memory compression but Sprite Kit sounds rather unrivalled by first parties. I would love to have his views on it all.

Indeed over the long term modules isn't a bad idea as the interface requirements and discoverability would benefit massively from better tooling, a la optional typing.

Out of how many of the big ones are using scripting tools/language-to-language translation though? Hint: much more than you seem to be aware of/think.

Whether its Google Web Toolkit/Java/C#-to-Javascript generators, Closure templating, Haskell/Clojure/etc. mini-languages, TypeScript, etc. (Job Ad Requirements are one of the great ways to see all this stuff)

When you start working on big applications (e.g. I worked for 5 years on a huge electronic HR application covering everything from timesheets to recruitment to content management to CRM with multi-country, multi-language, multi-regulatory, multi-company, multi-site, multi-thousand users requirements) you realise JavaScript has serious shortcomings...although I still really like the language the tooling and knowledge advances have really, really helped.