Shame they don't seem to be keeping a keyboard phone in their lineup. There seemed to be talk of an HTC One Z - to follow on the naming convention and have a keyboard version of their latest phones - but it doesn't seem to have materialised.
I've got a normal Desire, but having migrated from a Palm Pre, just can't quite get used to the lack of a real keyboard. I was tempted by the Z at the time, but felt the writing was on the wall for keyboard phones and that I'd have to get to grips with touchscreen typing eventually. Still don't like it, nearly a year on.
But maybe that's an age thing, so pardon me while I stop typing and go tell those kids to get off my lawn.
The Olympics are a deterrent to people going to London at all - shops or otherwise. The main park is just one part of it - venues all over London are being used, and there have been dire warnings about how busy it's going to be for months. Net result: everyone steers clear for the duration. Even the commuter trains are emptier than you'd expect, even for holiday season.
I think that's best illustrated by the fact that people who have to go into London are enjoying the relative quiet!
As I said in my first post, though, that's evidence of it being quiet, not of the restrictions being the cause
You might be surprised at what the law considers "personal information". Even an e-mail address, used to notify you of new posts on a forum or to act as a unique key in the user list, is "personal information" under at least one U.S. federal law.
Yes, but what I'm saying is it doesn't really matter if someone steals my generic forum logon password - all they'll get is my throwaway email account to spam and the ability to post on sites like this as me.
So what do you when you want to check your bank balance from a machine other than your PC?
My bank supplies a (physical) code generator that takes a pin number and generates a number. I don't carry that with me either, so I can't get access to my bank account when I'm out anyway.
Having said that, I was simplifying. I do keep a copy of the password file on my phone. It's encrypted, and there's an Android version of the vault software. I could even sync it using dropbox, but why trust the encryption more than I need to!
Finally, all my passwords are one of a few keywords followed by a random set of characters. I only store the random characters and the first letter of the keyword in the vault - enough to remind me which word to use as the prefix. Might not add much security, but it's one more layer
Regardless of whether passwords are a good measure, I do use a unique strong password for every important site I visit - i.e. ones that store personal or financial information. Not so bothered with forum logins and the like where it really doesn't matter all that much if they're compromised.
I only remember one password, though, and that's the one to my password database that's stored locally on my PC. I use KeePass, but there are plenty of other password safe applications.
Even when better, cheaper (even better free/open source) alternatives exist, brands count. Look at monitoring (something of my specialist area). BMC still does well despite being ridiculously expensive for what it does. I'd wager that most customers would get just as much functionality from one of the cheaper alternatives (even the likes of Nagios), but BMC have managed to occupy the Gartner magic quadrant and big companies will only look at the big names.
I'm forced to use BMC Patrol, and some of the bugs in what should be a mature product are shocking.
As long as you manage to move any customizations the user has made to increase his productivity.
We had a hot desk policy for a while - "all desks are hot desks, first come first served". We had to abandon it when it became obvious that users have different needs - right down to raising desk height for taller users. I choose to use a natural keyboard, not because I need to particularly, but mainly to stop other people using my desk when I'm not in - it's amazing how much trouble most people have typing on it!
OK, I know software customisation is different and most should be done on the network - roaming profiles and so on. Not always possible though, and most users also use their work PC as a temporary filestore - yes, stuff that needs backing up should be on the network, but sometimes you need to mess about with large files temporarily and using local storage is easier to avoid pissing off your network and/or storage teams!
Ditto - gmail + thunderbird for a local backup so I don't lose anything should gmail ever go AWOL.
The best thing for me about gmail (in apps) is that I can point my domains MX records at it and avoid the issues of mail sent via an ISP from my domain being flagged as spam because domain lookups don't match. That, and being able to access the mail on my phone, tablet, work PC and at home. Oh, and the search blows away any desktop client I've used.
It's things like this that make me - and possibly small businesses - nervous about email and the other google apps products
While it's unlikely they'd ever kill gmail, it makes it harder to make a case to bet the farm on google. Shame there's no really viable alternative to email with a half decent web interface (animated ads flickering in the corner of my eye annoy the hell out of me and I don't want to jump through ad-blocking hoops on every PC I ever use).
So iGoogle might not be a big product, but it's visible enough (unlike maybe some of the smaller products they've killed) to make potential users pause.
Not really. If you're concerned about uptime of your service you'll have clustering and load balancing and can bring nodes offline to upgrade without impacting service.
We generally prefer to reboot after upgrades so we know the server will come up cleanly on the new version, rather than wait until we have to reboot for some other reason and then figure out which change caused the problem if the server doesn't come up...
Boot times are irrelevant for a lot of people. Doesn't matter how slow the drive is, I can still boot my PC in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee - arrive at work, switch on, go for a coffee, PC's up and waiting when I get back. Same with opening applications - it's not something I do often, so time isn't critical.
It's like optimising code - make the optimisation where it makes most difference, not in infrequently used parts of the application
Even data read/writes aren't often critical. If I'm editing photos, the time is spent with the image in RAM. The time spent reading it from disk and writing back when I'm done is tiny in comparison. I'd say for most desktop/laptop users faster drives would be nice but not worth-spending-more nice. Obviously different with server applications.
Screen's not huge, it's an HTC Desire. I wouldn't actually mind the screen being heavier use. It's the idle/standby that annoys me - the level of drain when the phone really isn't being asked to do much more than an old dumbphone. I only have one email account syncing, and that's not a busy one as I've deliberately set filters to minimise how much reaches my inbox.
At the moment it's literally 50% each for idle and cell standby, and that's despite having checked emails on and off, browsed a bit of Facebook - not much, but even so that use hasn't even registered in the stats.
Yeah, but that's generally dominated by screen (though I guess the fact that I use the web a good bit, and my last two high-end phones were OLED could be to blame)
Is it, though? My Android lasts a couple of days if I don't use it much. Looking at the stats, it's 50/50 between cell standby and phone idle, with a few percent for screen and system. My old dumbphones would last at least ten days on the same use. It seems smartphones aren't good at regressing to being dumbphones when the smart features aren't in use.
Even when I'm using it heavily, the screen is always lower on the battery stats than the system and cell standby
I'd like to see their working on the financial figures. According to the document the Bill "is estimated to lead to an
increase in public expenditure of up to £1.8 billion over 10 years from 2011/12. Benefits from
this investment are estimated to be £5 – 6.2 billion over the same period."
Exactly what financial benefits? Where's the saving?
Otherwise, the question we should all, in the UK, be asking our MPs is which hospitals are going to be closed to pay for this?
From the first few pages of the document, they are talking about communication data but not content - i.e. source, destination, perhaps size. Stuff ISPs probably log but might not store. It is explicitly excluding content
It's still not great, but to take a telephone analogy it's like the itemised billing stats, not recording all the calls. Or a physical example - getting the post office to record the address written on the envelope, but not open it and read the contents.
From the actual document itself: "Nothing in these proposals will authorise the interception of the content of a
communication. Nor will it require the collection of all internet data, which would be
neither feasible, necessary nor proportionate."
It will still give ISPs an excuse to increase their prices, but I don't think it's quite time to break out the tin foil hats...
Good points, Ian, Basil, hawguy. I guess I had a - perhaps outdated - view that any use that involved frequent writes was likely to be a problem (e.g. compiling, which may write a lot of intermediate files and constantly change output files, or anything that writes significant log files)
Sounds like I might be wrong in that thinking, and need to do more research (you'll forgive me for not taking on face value anything I read on Slashdot, I hope!?)
I guess, though, that the extra RAM - 8GB as standard - is to pretty much guarantee that it won't need to swap (something else I thought was a bit of a no-no for SSDs). Maybe there's also room there to mount/tmp in memory, if it isn't anyway.
It's not so much speed as number of writes, although I see a sibling post addresses that.
Storage size is another good point, and a laptop with a built in 500GB drive is far more useful for me. I guess I wouldn't use it for serious photo editing anyway, as a physically larger screen is going to be better even if it's actually lower res (maybe? perhaps I should try)
Both is one thing - SSD for the OS and program files that won't change often, traditional drive for data - but not just SSD for some uses. Sure, if you're mainly browsing the web it's probably fine (although I'd hope that something sensible was done with the cache - maybe storing it in memory until you close the browser, to minimise writes).
As I say, though, for dev work where you might be compiling software, you're going to be hitting the write limit well within the expected lifetime of the laptop.
I think the big turnoff for me is that they only have flash storage
The limited writes are likely to be a factor for some uses, surely? I certainly wouldn't want to be using one as a development machine, or for serious photography (my other main computer use).
All racial terminology is arbitrary and largely based on artificial social preferences.
Why not just refer to people as "human" and be done with it?
Perhaps when you want to describe someone? It makes me laugh when people tie themselves in knots trying to describe someone without using colour - you'd use height, hair colour and style - loads of things like that. Why not skin?
Sometimes it's the clearest identifying characteristic. I've had it at work - someone has told me I need to go to another office and speak to the a guy - "Oh, the tallish one, medium build, er.. brown eyes...". He was the only black man in the office - surely that would have been a lot easier, but they felt it would be racist to mention it.
I know I'm coming to this late in the conversation (damn real life!) but the thing that would bother me most is the lack of a normal hard drive. SSDs are all well and good, but there are a lot of use cases that would hit the drive hard and I'd be concerned about the limits on the number of writes compared with normal drives.
I assume that's part of the reason for the 8GB RAM as standard - to avoid swapping and maybe mount temp files in a memory based filesystem. Even so, the life of the drive is likely to be an issue, surely?
Slashdot Mirror
Shame they don't seem to be keeping a keyboard phone in their lineup. There seemed to be talk of an HTC One Z - to follow on the naming convention and have a keyboard version of their latest phones - but it doesn't seem to have materialised.
I've got a normal Desire, but having migrated from a Palm Pre, just can't quite get used to the lack of a real keyboard. I was tempted by the Z at the time, but felt the writing was on the wall for keyboard phones and that I'd have to get to grips with touchscreen typing eventually. Still don't like it, nearly a year on.
But maybe that's an age thing, so pardon me while I stop typing and go tell those kids to get off my lawn.
The Palm Pre managed a touchscreen and a pretty decent keyboard. And a pretty decent OS, for that matter.
The Olympics are a deterrent to people going to London at all - shops or otherwise. The main park is just one part of it - venues all over London are being used, and there have been dire warnings about how busy it's going to be for months. Net result: everyone steers clear for the duration. Even the commuter trains are emptier than you'd expect, even for holiday season.
I think that's best illustrated by the fact that people who have to go into London are enjoying the relative quiet!
As I said in my first post, though, that's evidence of it being quiet, not of the restrictions being the cause
You might be surprised at what the law considers "personal information". Even an e-mail address, used to notify you of new posts on a forum or to act as a unique key in the user list, is "personal information" under at least one U.S. federal law.
Yes, but what I'm saying is it doesn't really matter if someone steals my generic forum logon password - all they'll get is my throwaway email account to spam and the ability to post on sites like this as me.
So what do you when you want to check your bank balance from a machine other than your PC?
My bank supplies a (physical) code generator that takes a pin number and generates a number. I don't carry that with me either, so I can't get access to my bank account when I'm out anyway.
Having said that, I was simplifying. I do keep a copy of the password file on my phone. It's encrypted, and there's an Android version of the vault software. I could even sync it using dropbox, but why trust the encryption more than I need to!
Finally, all my passwords are one of a few keywords followed by a random set of characters. I only store the random characters and the first letter of the keyword in the vault - enough to remind me which word to use as the prefix. Might not add much security, but it's one more layer
There you go (WRT the lack of customers, not the cause being the venue restrictions)
Regardless of whether passwords are a good measure, I do use a unique strong password for every important site I visit - i.e. ones that store personal or financial information. Not so bothered with forum logins and the like where it really doesn't matter all that much if they're compromised.
I only remember one password, though, and that's the one to my password database that's stored locally on my PC. I use KeePass, but there are plenty of other password safe applications.
Nail. Head.
Even when better, cheaper (even better free/open source) alternatives exist, brands count. Look at monitoring (something of my specialist area). BMC still does well despite being ridiculously expensive for what it does. I'd wager that most customers would get just as much functionality from one of the cheaper alternatives (even the likes of Nagios), but BMC have managed to occupy the Gartner magic quadrant and big companies will only look at the big names.
I'm forced to use BMC Patrol, and some of the bugs in what should be a mature product are shocking.
As long as you manage to move any customizations the user has made to increase his productivity.
We had a hot desk policy for a while - "all desks are hot desks, first come first served". We had to abandon it when it became obvious that users have different needs - right down to raising desk height for taller users. I choose to use a natural keyboard, not because I need to particularly, but mainly to stop other people using my desk when I'm not in - it's amazing how much trouble most people have typing on it!
OK, I know software customisation is different and most should be done on the network - roaming profiles and so on. Not always possible though, and most users also use their work PC as a temporary filestore - yes, stuff that needs backing up should be on the network, but sometimes you need to mess about with large files temporarily and using local storage is easier to avoid pissing off your network and/or storage teams!
And keep the ghost image up to date with security fixes, AV updates etc?
Seems art is a get out of jail, or at least lawsuit, card:
See the Nussenzweig vs DiCorcia case for precedence. Yes, different circumstances, but it's a photo of an identifiable person.
Ditto - gmail + thunderbird for a local backup so I don't lose anything should gmail ever go AWOL.
The best thing for me about gmail (in apps) is that I can point my domains MX records at it and avoid the issues of mail sent via an ISP from my domain being flagged as spam because domain lookups don't match. That, and being able to access the mail on my phone, tablet, work PC and at home. Oh, and the search blows away any desktop client I've used.
It's things like this that make me - and possibly small businesses - nervous about email and the other google apps products
While it's unlikely they'd ever kill gmail, it makes it harder to make a case to bet the farm on google. Shame there's no really viable alternative to email with a half decent web interface (animated ads flickering in the corner of my eye annoy the hell out of me and I don't want to jump through ad-blocking hoops on every PC I ever use).
So iGoogle might not be a big product, but it's visible enough (unlike maybe some of the smaller products they've killed) to make potential users pause.
But if you do, don't talk to her too much.
Think the first lines of Soul Asylum's Without A Trace. Google it if you have to. It can happen. Happened to a, erm, friend of mine.
Business users sure care about uptime.
Not really. If you're concerned about uptime of your service you'll have clustering and load balancing and can bring nodes offline to upgrade without impacting service.
We generally prefer to reboot after upgrades so we know the server will come up cleanly on the new version, rather than wait until we have to reboot for some other reason and then figure out which change caused the problem if the server doesn't come up...
Boot times are irrelevant for a lot of people. Doesn't matter how slow the drive is, I can still boot my PC in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee - arrive at work, switch on, go for a coffee, PC's up and waiting when I get back. Same with opening applications - it's not something I do often, so time isn't critical.
It's like optimising code - make the optimisation where it makes most difference, not in infrequently used parts of the application
Even data read/writes aren't often critical. If I'm editing photos, the time is spent with the image in RAM. The time spent reading it from disk and writing back when I'm done is tiny in comparison. I'd say for most desktop/laptop users faster drives would be nice but not worth-spending-more nice. Obviously different with server applications.
Screen's not huge, it's an HTC Desire. I wouldn't actually mind the screen being heavier use. It's the idle/standby that annoys me - the level of drain when the phone really isn't being asked to do much more than an old dumbphone. I only have one email account syncing, and that's not a busy one as I've deliberately set filters to minimise how much reaches my inbox.
At the moment it's literally 50% each for idle and cell standby, and that's despite having checked emails on and off, browsed a bit of Facebook - not much, but even so that use hasn't even registered in the stats.
Yeah, but that's generally dominated by screen (though I guess the fact that I use the web a good bit, and my last two high-end phones were OLED could be to blame)
Is it, though? My Android lasts a couple of days if I don't use it much. Looking at the stats, it's 50/50 between cell standby and phone idle, with a few percent for screen and system. My old dumbphones would last at least ten days on the same use. It seems smartphones aren't good at regressing to being dumbphones when the smart features aren't in use.
Even when I'm using it heavily, the screen is always lower on the battery stats than the system and cell standby
I'd like to see their working on the financial figures. According to the document the Bill "is estimated to lead to an increase in public expenditure of up to £1.8 billion over 10 years from 2011/12. Benefits from this investment are estimated to be £5 – 6.2 billion over the same period."
Exactly what financial benefits? Where's the saving?
Otherwise, the question we should all, in the UK, be asking our MPs is which hospitals are going to be closed to pay for this?
From the first few pages of the document, they are talking about communication data but not content - i.e. source, destination, perhaps size. Stuff ISPs probably log but might not store. It is explicitly excluding content
It's still not great, but to take a telephone analogy it's like the itemised billing stats, not recording all the calls. Or a physical example - getting the post office to record the address written on the envelope, but not open it and read the contents.
From the actual document itself: "Nothing in these proposals will authorise the interception of the content of a communication. Nor will it require the collection of all internet data, which would be neither feasible, necessary nor proportionate."
It will still give ISPs an excuse to increase their prices, but I don't think it's quite time to break out the tin foil hats...
Good points, Ian, Basil, hawguy. I guess I had a - perhaps outdated - view that any use that involved frequent writes was likely to be a problem (e.g. compiling, which may write a lot of intermediate files and constantly change output files, or anything that writes significant log files)
Sounds like I might be wrong in that thinking, and need to do more research (you'll forgive me for not taking on face value anything I read on Slashdot, I hope!?)
I guess, though, that the extra RAM - 8GB as standard - is to pretty much guarantee that it won't need to swap (something else I thought was a bit of a no-no for SSDs). Maybe there's also room there to mount /tmp in memory, if it isn't anyway.
It's not so much speed as number of writes, although I see a sibling post addresses that.
Storage size is another good point, and a laptop with a built in 500GB drive is far more useful for me. I guess I wouldn't use it for serious photo editing anyway, as a physically larger screen is going to be better even if it's actually lower res (maybe? perhaps I should try)
Both is one thing - SSD for the OS and program files that won't change often, traditional drive for data - but not just SSD for some uses. Sure, if you're mainly browsing the web it's probably fine (although I'd hope that something sensible was done with the cache - maybe storing it in memory until you close the browser, to minimise writes).
As I say, though, for dev work where you might be compiling software, you're going to be hitting the write limit well within the expected lifetime of the laptop.
The limited writes are likely to be a factor for some uses, surely? I certainly wouldn't want to be using one as a development machine, or for serious photography (my other main computer use).
All racial terminology is arbitrary and largely based on artificial social preferences.
Why not just refer to people as "human" and be done with it?
Perhaps when you want to describe someone? It makes me laugh when people tie themselves in knots trying to describe someone without using colour - you'd use height, hair colour and style - loads of things like that. Why not skin?
Sometimes it's the clearest identifying characteristic. I've had it at work - someone has told me I need to go to another office and speak to the a guy - "Oh, the tallish one, medium build, er.. brown eyes...". He was the only black man in the office - surely that would have been a lot easier, but they felt it would be racist to mention it.
I assume that's part of the reason for the 8GB RAM as standard - to avoid swapping and maybe mount temp files in a memory based filesystem. Even so, the life of the drive is likely to be an issue, surely?