Re: Breaking up something large is PATENTED?

The important thing is the use case of the parent, ie itscontext. This is breaking up something in the context of SMS.

Otherwise breaking up a chocolate bar could be patented.

Re: As much as I like the Windows 8 Metro concept....

Tablets have come along, but they aren't going to replace the desktop or laptop. Just like people still have desk phones in their office, paper and pen, photocopiers and so on.

IMHO the popularity of the tablet in enterprise (Microsoft's typical strength) is down to it being a device which can replace paper forms.

So people who are walking around a building such a health professional doing the rounds in a hospital can press buttons, tick boxes and the data can then be sent immediately back to an operations database and a dashboard somewhere can be updated so the decision makers can see what is going on.

This replaces the need for paper forms, scanning or data entry and eliminates errors as electronic forms can be validated.

It's hard to see how a vastly complex weighty Win8 tablet will do the above efficiently with enough battery to do a whole working day.

Re: Why should he care?

There's millions who had Vista but don't use it. OEM licences ship with most computers and companies often wipe the OEM licence and use their site licence.

Re: Samsung Fanbois

Not to mention the fact that when supplies are low they go for inferior panels made by competitors for their monitors.

Re: Waiting to pre-order...

Plenty of people around doing cool stuff with Arduino boards with 64k.

Not open source either.

It uses closed source drivers for the kernel. Not very sporting is it?

Re: Epic Fail

Once they are discovered they can be remotely killed and it is pretty simple to return the phone back to a working state.

Re: "Why is it an offence to separate a fool and his money?"

Insurers call that contributory negligence and refuse to pay out.

Because you can make chips out of them?

Re: @spencer

It is a bit annoying when an iPad can have a much higher resolution on a smaller screen.

I've got about three different browsers on mine.

But you see the problem here is for the tablet UI Microsoft are using HTML5 and how can they guarantee that a 3rd party browser will work 100% the same? they can't so it means they have to mandate IE.

Re: Boring

Some in the US government seem to think that being anti-Microsoft seems to equate to being anti-American .

Almost as if having a US monopoly is a good thing as if there wasn't one it might mean foreign companies having more of a share.

Re: Abolish patents now!

Having patents allows for a small company to have some protection against their new ideas being ripped off. It is hard to start a new company with a great new idea without them.

The problem is patents are also granted to huge companies and this is where the system fails.

Re: Can't be arsed to google it.

They supplied Wintel/DOS machines (Nimbus) after the old RM 8-bit machines were phased out.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1011&st=1

Re: 5 months and obsolete

They tend to use the excuse that it is up to the OEMs to decide if they provide the update. Which basically means OEMs have to pay Microsoft a royalty and also do lots of testing to ensure it works. So basically no, it costs them money to provide an update.

Not that the situation is much different with Android phones, except that you can at least take a minor gamble and run community firmware which should work fine.

Re: Sad

It is one thing for individuals to be reliant on it but another more dangerous thing for planes, cars and ships to be reliant on it.

You can see how driverless cars can be made to crash if they are reliant on positioning technology.

Re: Apple Rumours...

Indeed. Very few turn out to be real. It's almost like Apple leaks out lots of fake information to confuse their rivals.

They know full well that x86 based designs totally suck for mobile. Okay, I had a phone with a 486 in it once, but it was Nokia communicator brick and the 486 was pretty old and relatively efficient by then.

If you like open source and freedom then don't let Intel take over the mobile market, you don't want another monopoly. While you think ARM is a monopoly in mobile, they don't actually make any chips and anyone can licence their designs. ARM's income isn't vast but they aren't a huge company in terms of employee count.

Re: It's all so depressing...

Harriers aren't supersonic. It doesn't really make sense to be designing your defence strategy around 1960s technology.

Re: "change consumer behaviour"

That's like asking people to comply with the speed limits. We've all seen the objections people have to speed cameras and the Police enforcing the law.

Unless of course you are in a monopoly style situation. You have one of a few items in the world or your neighbour wants to buy some land off you, meaning they can't go elsewhere.

Re: Another Big Patch Day, and a Week of Start Up Repair Routines

That's what drives me mad about Windows, way too many updates. The disk doesn't stop going for about 10 minutes after log on. Plus then you have to let your machine install updates on shutdown too.

If you don't need it on the Internet (niche use purpose these days, but still a possibility) then you're probably best to update it to the latest service pack then disable network connectivity and update systems.

Re: Ubuntu, viable for developers?

Yes we all know you can simply replace Windows with Linux. What people want however is a way to not pay the "Microsoft tax" and also not to have Windows keys or Microsoft stickers all over the damn thing.

Re: BetaDrive

Yes, but the software in ECUs is very simple. It is a lot easier to test for problems.

At least if you are driving and there's a problem you can usually deal with it. How are you going to stop the car driving off the cliff if you can't disengage the autopilot?

Remember Toyota? they couldn't even design an accelerator pedal that didn't get stuck. A simple pivot. But you could at least pull the pedal back with your foot.

Re: @Dave 126

"It can be improved", try telling that to a couple who've just lost one of their kids after being run over by a driverless car.

"It's okay, we found the bug and have installed service pack 1".

Re: On the one hand...but on the other...

Fly by wire is dead simple as you're flying through air to a nice curvy line. All a fly by wire does is look where the plane is relative to the plan and make little adjustments to move it back to where it should be.

No people in the way, planes are kept very far apart.

Perhaps if driverless cars were controlled by a driving control centre and pedestrians were banned from crossing the road then it would be a safe system.

Re: On the one hand...but on the other...

Humans have intelligence and driving requires it at times. I imagine the car is using some sort of route planning? so what about inaccurate route data? suddenly you're going down a one way street the wrong way due to the direction being changed. A human would realise their mistake, a self driving car isn't going to know.

People don't give the human body enough credit, it's far more sophisticated and reliable than a computer at doing many things. Computers are great at processing numbers but they are not good at making decisions where there isn't a very clear answer.

It won't be long before this car encounters a problem it hasn't been programmed to deal with and they'll wonder why it was granted a licence.

Re: Acorn's demise in perspective...

That's always been the problem. It doesn't matter how good the hardware is, if there's no software available that you wish to use then it no good.

This is what affects Linux for instance. It may be great at many things, but it's not much good for running the popular tools people want to use. Office, Photoshop etc.

Even the Amiga and ST which did have many cool tools (ST was popular for Cubase in music studios) gave way to the PeeCee. So what hope did the Arc have when even the big US alternatives dried up?

We don't seem to dominate much as we don't seem to produce products that have a good reputation for build and engineering

Acorn machines were the Linux of the day, less games and commercial software, more educational and development.

Re: Thunderport

Not just faster it doesn't burden the CPU as much which is critical when doing audio or video work.

Re: I hate to say it but.....

The OSes have stood still for some time. There's small improvements, but Microsoft is the only one making huge leaps. Obviously if you make a huge leap you can end up leaping off a cliff, but they're at least trying. It seems to me like Android and iOS are just copying each other.

Re: As solid a financial decision as buying Instagram

When has Facebook created anything new? most social networks owe a lot to journal sites like Livejournal. All Facebook did was create a view that lets you see all your friends updates in one big list., Livejournal required you to view each person's journal individually.

Their site may work slick and easy to use but it's pretty much the Microsoft approach, watch what everyone else does then fix all their problems. It's probably why Microsoft invested in Facebook.

Re: mmmm.......

I don't think so. I think Intel are horrified at a whole new generation of kids growing up with ARM development. Just like Microsoft will do anything it can to ensure Windows is the one and only OS kids grow up with.

Intel are trying pretty hard to get rid of ARM in phones and I'm pretty sure there's been some calls to Microsoft about their ARM version of Windows. Intel has managed to kill off competition in the past, remember Transmeta and how Sony suddenly dropped the Transmeta chip?