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How Far the Mighty Have Fallen

April 10, 2014 9:52:07.521

They aren't "CrackBerries" any longer:

BlackBerry Ltd would consider exiting its handset business if it remains unprofitable, its chief executive officer said on Wednesday, as the technology company looks to expand its corporate reach with investments, acquisitions and partnerships.

It's been a very fast fall, too - right up to the introduction of the iPhone, and the rapid rise of Android, Blackberry owned the smartphone category.

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posted by James Robertson

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Repudiating Windows 8

January 13, 2014 20:56:14.000

It dawns on Microsoft that a laptop or desktop is different than a tablet or a phone:

To distance itself from the Windows 8 snafu, Microsoft's next major update -- Threshold -- will reportedly skip Windows 8.2 and jump straight to Windows 9. Windows 9 is expected to arrive in April 2015, with internal sources saying that Windows 9 will make good on many of the Windows 8 features that caused such cruel and unusual distress to Desktop users. The Start menu is expected to make its illustrious return, and you should be able to run Metro apps on the Desktop in windows. Microsoft is still on schedule to release Windows Phone 8.1 and a service/feature pack for Windows 8.1 at the Build conference in April.

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posted by James Robertson

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Digital Distribution and Data Caps

January 3, 2014 12:02:20.205

This is a nice, concise explanation of how the move towards data caps in US internet service plans makes digital distribution (for instance, games) much more difficult than it should be. Steam a few HD movies and download a few games, and you could hit the "large" 300 GB cap Comcast has pretty fast.

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posted by James Robertson

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Windows 8 Sinks

March 1, 2013 22:00:24.000

I think this was inevitable - other than gamers (who are always after the fastest/newest equipment), very few people need a new machine - anything made within the last five years or so works just fine for most business needs:

It has now been four months since Windows 8 was released, and the latest figures show that its growth — in terms of market share, mind share, and the number of apps in the Windows 8 Store — is almost at a standstill.

That said, MS can't be happy about this comparison:

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but Windows Vista actually enjoyed faster growth than Windows 8

Ouch

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posted by James Robertson

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iTunes 11 - Not that Hard

December 1, 2012 12:37:47.065

In the midst of a long post about how iTunes is (or should be) an outliner, Dave Winer makes it clear that he hasn't really tried anything with it:

Anyway, luckily if you know what pref to turn on, you can get iTunes working again. The way it ships you can't use it to move content onto an iPad or iPod. Not exactly a minor function of iTunes.

Gosh, I plugged my iPad into my Mac a few minutes ago, and - just like any other version of iTunes I've ever seen - it started synching. Backing apps up, and moving music I've bought since the last synch over to the iPad. The preference Winer speaks of seems to involve the way iTunes deals with a device it hasn't seen before, and for that, I'd say "automatic synching" is the wrong answer. The last thing you want is to plug your wife's iPod in to charge, and have her lose all of her music off it when you went on auto-pilot.

Meanwhile, Farhad Manjoo demonstrates that he's not really done more than read other people rant about the software:

Anyway, so iTunes 11 finally hit the Internet today. If you start downloading it immediately, you might be able to get it up and running by the time the ball drops over Times Square. People always wonder why this is—why a simple music player weighs in at around 90 megabytes and requires many long minutes to install and “prepare” your library before it becomes functional. Don’t ask questions—this is just what you get with iTunes. Each new upgrade brings more suckage into your computer.

I'm not about to praise iTunes - it does tend to get bigger and slower with each release. However, this release seems to be a bit different. The installation was fast, and when I started iTunes up, I didn't see the dread "converting library" that I usually see. Instead, my music was right in front of me, ready to play. I get the distinct feeling that Winer and Manjoo dusted off their reviews of the last release of iTunes, slapped a new date on it, and let fly.

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posted by James Robertson

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Whither Microsoft?

November 15, 2012 18:30:42.176

This article is a bit over the top in the "Microsoft is Doomed" category - but I suspect that MS is just about at the point IBM reached in the late 70's, before it all came apart.

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posted by James Robertson

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Math is Hard

November 14, 2012 8:44:37.275

If you're AT&T, it's so hard that it's a proprietary trade secret:

As many of you know, AT&T has implemented caps on DSL usage. When this was implemented, I started getting emails letting me know my usage as likely to exceed the cap. After consulting their Internet Usage web page, I felt the numbers just weren't right. With the help of Tomato on my router, I started measuring my usage, and ended up with numbers substantially below what AT&T was reporting on a day-to-day basis. Typically around 20-30% less. By the way, this usage is the sum of inbound and outbound. At this point, I decided to contact AT&T support to determine what exactly they were defining as usage, as their web pages never really define it. Boy, did I get a surprise. After several calls, they finally told me they consider the methodology by which they calculate bandwidth usage to be proprietary. Yes, you read that right; it's a secret.

I've noticed the same differential on my "usage" tab on my iPhone and the text messages AT&T sends out.

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posted by James Robertson

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AdBlock Plus Ate My CPU

November 6, 2012 14:42:16.000

Over the last week or two, I've noticed that my Mac seemed to be active a lot more often than I thought it should be - and when it was, there was always a "Chrome Worker" eating the CPU. It had gotten to the point where it was impacting the performance of everything, including games. I finally started disabling extensions (I have very few) last night, and sure enough - it was "AdBlock Plus". I turned that off, and I must have gained 10 fps in "Dishonored" (which I play in a Windows VM) immediately.

Chrome also got faster - pages that had been hanging, or taking forever to load, started loading right away (even on crappy hotel wifi).

I'm leaving that extension off - whatever it was doing (and I wasn't seeing fewer ads, that's for sure), it wasn't good.

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posted by James Robertson

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Asking the Wrong Questions

October 23, 2012 16:12:04.000

Slashdot Insults Users with the wrong question:

'Nonsense. The long and short of it is: If my 3 years old son can learn Windows 8 through very moderate usage, anybody with half a brain can do so too.' Bill Gates has already successfully made the transition to what he calls an 'unbelievably great' Microsoft Surface. On Friday, we'll start finding out if current Windows XP and Windows 7 users are also smarter than the average 3-year-old!'

The issue isn't whether users can figure out Windows 8; it's whether they can do what they do now with XP or Windows 7, and whether doing that requires more effort, or less. If the answer is that it takes more effort (especially on non-touch systems), then yes - it's too hard to use.

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posted by James Robertson

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The Trolls are Eating the Tech Jobs

May 8, 2012 19:51:34.162

Between the patent trolls and the lawyers they employ, vast sums of money that could be going into something productive are instead doing two value free things:

  • Defending (or paying off) against bogus patent claims
  • Building up a MAD style array of patents to use as defensive weapons

Here's what the Washington Post has to say about it:

In the smartphone market alone, $15-20 billion has already been spent by technology companies on building defenses, says Stanford Law School professor Mark Lemley. For example, Google bought Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion—mostly for its patents. An Apple-Microsoft-Oracle-Nokia consortium bought Nortel’s patent portfolio for $4.5 billion. Microsoft bought Novell’s patent portfolio for $450 million and some of AOL’s patents for $1 billion. Facebook bought some of Microsoft’s new AOL patents for $550 million. Lemley estimates that more than $500 million has been squandered on legal fees—and battles are just beginning. This is money that could have been spent, instead, on R&D.

The only ones who are making out under the current system are the lawyers, and they are parasitically feasting at the trough. It's time to get rid of software patents. Don't reform them; kill them dead.

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posted by James Robertson

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