The iPhone revolutionised the mobile phone market, essentially turning smartphones that had limited use and poor experience into things that are quick and reliable. Now we're tweaking and improving, it's hard for anyone to carve a niche. WP7's niche is that it totally integrates your contacts. If you know the same person in twitter, linkedin, your email db, facebook and more, WP7 seamlessly integrates them into the one person they are. That's it's killer app. The problem is that it takes more than a one-day test to really see this benefit so reviews are never going to "get it".
Second.
MS are keen not to make the mistake Android is making (or that they made in the PCmarket). They want to standardise the platform. This is easy for Apple/iPhone, they're the only ones making one. Not so easy keeping HTC, Samsung, Nokia and others to stick to one design. There's nothing for them to distinguish themselves in the market.
Roll on Windows 8 and tablets - then iPhone will be under serious threat. For most consumers, the tablet - if properly conceived and integrated - is a far better computer experience than the PC/Laptop.
(disclosure: I'm a devoted Lumia 800 and previously Samsung Omnia 7 owner)
My kids' school has something called "Wiz Kids" which is essentially a low grade social networking and collaboration/sharing tool. It allows them to post to boards, communicate with teachers and other students in their group (the teacher decides how wide groups are) and access resources provided by the teacher and other students.
The school uses "Parentmail" to communicate with the parents and other external groups (governors, PTA etc). This sends out emails with updates and notices, or SMS text messages for time critical information. It also has facilities for groups (PTA, board etc again) to share documents and communicate internally though we don't currently use that.
This is a primary school (kindergarten?) and I know many of the other primaries in the area use the same services. I guess they're quite widely used throughout the UK.
For the poorer kids, below a certain threshold there's money available to buy a netbook or similar. To the best of my knowledge no-one has claimed one though I could be wrong on that. Everyone has some sort of device that allows Internet access.
This is when I'd like to just be able to add points to a post, but instead I'll tag along. If a doctor isn't quite sure if I'm technically dead or not, please, rip out all my organs and bury what's left - I want to check out at that point.
I hate to think some anti-donor faction is rolling out this argument and dread to think it reducing the percentage of people donating. It's crap enough as it is in some places without applying FUD.
It's a pity, this is a great example and great use of technology but deep down, it's just not able to deliver any real benefits over any other sedan.
The energy costs of the car in an entire lifespan are probably equal or worse than petrol. This technology requires more energy to make and involves expensive mid-term disposable battery packs. Energy used for it has probably had 50% of it's already non-optimal conversion efficiency wasted in down-the-wire transmission.
When that's taken into account, what's the point really? Lets just get over to being a renewable power produced hydrogen economy already. There are no other options that really help.
I still want one though. Shove an apple logo on it and it'd sell by the shipload.
This happened early in the days of the Irish national lottery, though it wasn't simply due to a roll-over and the people who purchased all of the tickets they could had to win the jackpot to turn a profit. I believe they succeeded though I can't remember the details!
Not to take away from it, as I think it's a nice way of raising the profile of Bletchley Park among young mathematicians, but it's decoding as you're given the code-book.
I strongly believe this is going to be a future social revolution along the same lines of the Internet and Social Media.
The point at which we have all got our mobile phone/camera embedded in our body with the ability to record at at thought will be a revolution in personal security. It will no longer be possible to commit crime against the person without serious risk of being identified.
This may come as a wearable device or it may come as an implanted device. Hell, as we're blue sky thinking it may simply interface to the retina, but I think it's the next logical step in convergent devices - converge with the user. This is a step towards that.
My approach is fairly simple. I have a pair of cheap dual disk NAS boxes, one in my shed and the other in the house. The larger one backs up to the smaller one and both have the redundancy of RAID. I'm fairly happy with that, they should survive a fire without me feeling the need to dash into the burning building to save them.
I then have a HTPC (Acer Aspire Revo running XBMC) connected to my main TV which allows photo browsing. I've set up scripts that automatically file the photos based on their EXIF date (/yyyy/mm/dd)
However, something I also do, by virtue of my wife 'ordering' photos, is get them printed. She goes through the vast numbers of photos that we rarely look, cherry picks the best ones which I sometimes crop or adjust and sent off to be professionally printed. Our house is littered with photo books, albums and frames. Sure, if the house burns down they're gone but that's pretty normal. My mother has a collection of photos with burnt edges from her childhood.
Hmm, you want a job and (mistakenly I think) believe that the languages you've learned are under immediate economic threat. I'd argue that the reason those specific languages are under a perceived future threat is because of their mongrel ancestry But you discount the one set of languages that are free from such problems.
For the mere-mortal programmers out there, those that often end up settling on scripting languages, I think C#.NET is a great choice. None of the lax, frankly amateur programming styles of perl and php and much of the structure that allows you to write something that will genuinely be useful to the guy who replaces you.
I'm an ANSI C refugee who never really got on with C++ and moved to all sorts of rubbish in the intervening years. I've now settled back with C# and find in it a great structure that allows me to get on and write GOOD CODE.
Honestly, if you discount.NET I highly recommend Java or php - anything else and you're niche. Sometimes the niche might be well paid (Cobol comes to mind!), but mostly you're more marginalised than you started out.
I've been holding off getting an iPhone 4 (I had a 3GS) until WP7 was released and I could have a play...
So, a few days ago, when my contract allowed, I got them to send me the Samsung Omnia 7 (a UK variant of the phone, I think they dropped the ball a LOT by having such a confusing array of manufacturers and devices around the world, they could easily have rationalised that).
My options are...
1/ Use it, replacing the 3GS and sell that on eBay probably buying an iPod Touch Gen4 to cover the few features I'll be missing for the first 6 months while 3rd party devs catch up. 2/ Sell it on eBay and buy an iPhone 4
3 days of usage in, I'm veering towards keeping the WP7 though it's a very close call...
There are problems (listed at the end), but most of them are either just annoyances, things I miss from the iPhone or software which can, and I believe will, be fixed. The economics of avoiding the iPhone are hard to argue. Over 18 months (the length of contract), this is going to cost me about £450. The iPhone minimum contract was 24 months and would have cost me well in excess of £1100 with worse inclusions in the contract. Of course, the eBay route all but negates that but still...
Positives and negatives. For what it's worth, I don't view 3rd party multitasking as a positive feature, it's introduction to the iPhone in it's current form is an unmitigated disaster. That said, the jailbreak software, "Backgrounder" was a pretty good implementation...
Samsung Omnia 7 Fundemental Problems
Custom data/power socket. This is just Samsung's fault, they do this for all their phones and it's annoying. I guess the HTC doesn't have that problem.
No external mute switch - Just a nice feature from the iPhone, it's probably patented.
Freaking huge - It's bigger than the iPhones
No RDS on radio. Apparently the chip is likely to support this, maybe the API will some day so this could be software...
Third Party Problems (I believe these will all be resolved)
No Satellite Navigation
No Runkeeper/MapMyRun
Limited facebook integration and not great Facebook app. The interesting thing about this one is that I think the app fails due to it's compliance with the WP7 application styles. It just doesn't work very well for a more complicated app.
UI Problems
No cut and paste (They've promised this soon)
Too easy to mis-press send button ( I hope they notice this, but it's right beside the space button)
No spaces allowed in Exchange usernames (dumb, exchange and Windows allows it)
No navigation when in IE landscape (odd!)
marketplace is rubbish - especially search (this is pretty unforgiveable, I think it will be resolved though)
Can't change windows live account - (silly design bug I assume, they will hopefully resolve it)
No lock timeout setting - I want my phone to lock, but preferably after I've not used it for 10 mins, not instantly
Radio interface pretty rubbish (I'm writing my own as we speak)
I prefer the UI to the iPhone one. The iPhone was the first to become really responsive but they've not moved forward from there very much. This UI looks great at the moment and has NEVER been anything but slick and stable. Great multiple file selection for delete/move. It's a small thing, but I get a lot of spam and it's nice being able to quickly select it all and delete it all. It has an FM radio - OK, no big thing but it is a nice to have.
Which brings me to the numero uno, most important, most spectacular feature. I don't have to buy a £1000 computer in order to be a
Not really - Linux was free, Solaris wasn't. Facebook is free.
For those that don't like the whistles and bells, 'hide' them or face the fact that really, you don't like those you've selected as your friends.
Now, all they have to do is to convince 500 million people (or whatever it is FB claims today) to move over to their service that has no whistles or bells.
Umm..
1/ Build competitor
2/ Release to world
3/ ???
4/ Complete and utter failure.
One of the amazing things about Wave is that it brings the amazing new technology of character by character chat! Oh, except that's how 'talk' used to work decades ago, before the phrase IM was invented!
OK, for chatting with friends, can't see it catching on. Which is a pity because that massively limits it's userbase which in turn means way fewer non-geeks using it, and so less opportunities for it to be a de-facto communication tool where it might work.
Where's that? One volounteer group I work with has a lot of non-working individuals in it. They're not used to being copied in any mail that vaguely might include them in the set of 'people who give a shit about this'. They get home, see a huge pile of mass-group emails and pretty much delete the lot of them.
The ad-hoc Wiki nature of a Wave interests me. For an event we're organising, we could create a wave and people could chip in to each relevant part of it. as new people come on board, include them on the wave. The chairman role gets reduced to trying to maintain a reasonable structure to where everything goes.
Your kid is going to hate you for having such a boring job. There's little or no way you can spin it. My wife, who's long haul cabin crew, did a presentation and was loved, there's no WAY I'm ever gonna be stupid enough to try to follow that.
I guess you could put together a montage of footage from The Matrix and other movies and pretend that that's how you use computers.
A number of years ago the Whitehouse roof was indeed photoshopped - to a single colour for the whole surface. Nowadays it looks pretty untouched to me.
I've not been to Vegas since 2001 and to be honest, I'm pretty sad that I won't get to do the ST experience again. It was fantastic with one of the best 'wow' moments ever served up by any theme park ride I've ever been on.
Oh well, saves me having to go anywhere near the pit that is LV: Hilton I guess, least time spent that end of the strip the better:)
For what it's worth, the 404 error page being served on http://www.google.com/chrome is not their standard one - their standard one is to search for the whole url from the looks of things?
How about this for an idea - open source the code - I'm sure they'll find some pro-government coders out there willing to spend the 6-8hrs (max) that's probably required to write a routine to achieve this. Everyone likes a challenge:)
What is scarier, the fact that they're stupid enough to write these tactics down in a published manual, or that those involved are stupid enough that they need to have them written down for them?
War sucks, the problem is that we're taken to war, the symptom is the abuses that take place. Better to cure the problem than treat the symptom.
Slashdot Mirror
It's killer app is fully integrated contacts and social media. It's a hard one to understand though it's great when you've set it up and use it.
First.
The iPhone revolutionised the mobile phone market, essentially turning smartphones that had limited use and poor experience into things that are quick and reliable. Now we're tweaking and improving, it's hard for anyone to carve a niche. WP7's niche is that it totally integrates your contacts. If you know the same person in twitter, linkedin, your email db, facebook and more, WP7 seamlessly integrates them into the one person they are. That's it's killer app. The problem is that it takes more than a one-day test to really see this benefit so reviews are never going to "get it".
Second.
MS are keen not to make the mistake Android is making (or that they made in the PCmarket). They want to standardise the platform. This is easy for Apple/iPhone, they're the only ones making one. Not so easy keeping HTC, Samsung, Nokia and others to stick to one design. There's nothing for them to distinguish themselves in the market.
Roll on Windows 8 and tablets - then iPhone will be under serious threat. For most consumers, the tablet - if properly conceived and integrated - is a far better computer experience than the PC/Laptop.
(disclosure: I'm a devoted Lumia 800 and previously Samsung Omnia 7 owner)
My kids' school has something called "Wiz Kids" which is essentially a low grade social networking and collaboration/sharing tool. It allows them to post to boards, communicate with teachers and other students in their group (the teacher decides how wide groups are) and access resources provided by the teacher and other students.
The school uses "Parentmail" to communicate with the parents and other external groups (governors, PTA etc). This sends out emails with updates and notices, or SMS text messages for time critical information. It also has facilities for groups (PTA, board etc again) to share documents and communicate internally though we don't currently use that.
This is a primary school (kindergarten?) and I know many of the other primaries in the area use the same services. I guess they're quite widely used throughout the UK.
For the poorer kids, below a certain threshold there's money available to buy a netbook or similar. To the best of my knowledge no-one has claimed one though I could be wrong on that. Everyone has some sort of device that allows Internet access.
This is when I'd like to just be able to add points to a post, but instead I'll tag along. If a doctor isn't quite sure if I'm technically dead or not, please, rip out all my organs and bury what's left - I want to check out at that point.
I hate to think some anti-donor faction is rolling out this argument and dread to think it reducing the percentage of people donating. It's crap enough as it is in some places without applying FUD.
... Apple would probably sue them for a patent infringement. Better everyone stays well away from them and everything they produce.
It's a pity, this is a great example and great use of technology but deep down, it's just not able to deliver any real benefits over any other sedan.
The energy costs of the car in an entire lifespan are probably equal or worse than petrol. This technology requires more energy to make and involves expensive mid-term disposable battery packs. Energy used for it has probably had 50% of it's already non-optimal conversion efficiency wasted in down-the-wire transmission.
When that's taken into account, what's the point really? Lets just get over to being a renewable power produced hydrogen economy already. There are no other options that really help.
I still want one though. Shove an apple logo on it and it'd sell by the shipload.
M-x psychoanalyse-pinhead
This happened early in the days of the Irish national lottery, though it wasn't simply due to a roll-over and the people who purchased all of the tickets they could had to win the jackpot to turn a profit. I believe they succeeded though I can't remember the details!
Not to take away from it, as I think it's a nice way of raising the profile of Bletchley Park among young mathematicians, but it's decoding as you're given the code-book.
Without this software on your iDevice, you can't get adult material on the iPhone if parental locks are on. With it on, you can. What's to see here?
All apps that have unfettered access to the Internet have the 17+ nag screen. Browsers, RSS readers... This isn't a story, this is Apple bashing.
I strongly believe this is going to be a future social revolution along the same lines of the Internet and Social Media.
The point at which we have all got our mobile phone/camera embedded in our body with the ability to record at at thought will be a revolution in personal security. It will no longer be possible to commit crime against the person without serious risk of being identified.
This may come as a wearable device or it may come as an implanted device. Hell, as we're blue sky thinking it may simply interface to the retina, but I think it's the next logical step in convergent devices - converge with the user. This is a step towards that.
My approach is fairly simple. I have a pair of cheap dual disk NAS boxes, one in my shed and the other in the house. The larger one backs up to the smaller one and both have the redundancy of RAID. I'm fairly happy with that, they should survive a fire without me feeling the need to dash into the burning building to save them.
I then have a HTPC (Acer Aspire Revo running XBMC) connected to my main TV which allows photo browsing. I've set up scripts that automatically file the photos based on their EXIF date (/yyyy/mm/dd)
However, something I also do, by virtue of my wife 'ordering' photos, is get them printed. She goes through the vast numbers of photos that we rarely look, cherry picks the best ones which I sometimes crop or adjust and sent off to be professionally printed. Our house is littered with photo books, albums and frames. Sure, if the house burns down they're gone but that's pretty normal. My mother has a collection of photos with burnt edges from her childhood.
Hmm, you want a job and (mistakenly I think) believe that the languages you've learned are under immediate economic threat. I'd argue that the reason those specific languages are under a perceived future threat is because of their mongrel ancestry But you discount the one set of languages that are free from such problems.
For the mere-mortal programmers out there, those that often end up settling on scripting languages, I think C#.NET is a great choice. None of the lax, frankly amateur programming styles of perl and php and much of the structure that allows you to write something that will genuinely be useful to the guy who replaces you.
I'm an ANSI C refugee who never really got on with C++ and moved to all sorts of rubbish in the intervening years. I've now settled back with C# and find in it a great structure that allows me to get on and write GOOD CODE.
Honestly, if you discount .NET I highly recommend Java or php - anything else and you're niche. Sometimes the niche might be well paid (Cobol comes to mind!), but mostly you're more marginalised than you started out.
I've been holding off getting an iPhone 4 (I had a 3GS) until WP7 was released and I could have a play...
So, a few days ago, when my contract allowed, I got them to send me the Samsung Omnia 7 (a UK variant of the phone, I think they dropped the ball a LOT by having such a confusing array of manufacturers and devices around the world, they could easily have rationalised that).
My options are...
1/ Use it, replacing the 3GS and sell that on eBay probably buying an iPod Touch Gen4 to cover the few features I'll be missing for the first 6 months while 3rd party devs catch up.
2/ Sell it on eBay and buy an iPhone 4
3 days of usage in, I'm veering towards keeping the WP7 though it's a very close call...
There are problems (listed at the end), but most of them are either just annoyances, things I miss from the iPhone or software which can, and I believe will, be fixed. The economics of avoiding the iPhone are hard to argue. Over 18 months (the length of contract), this is going to cost me about £450. The iPhone minimum contract was 24 months and would have cost me well in excess of £1100 with worse inclusions in the contract. Of course, the eBay route all but negates that but still...
Positives and negatives. For what it's worth, I don't view 3rd party multitasking as a positive feature, it's introduction to the iPhone in it's current form is an unmitigated disaster. That said, the jailbreak software, "Backgrounder" was a pretty good implementation...
Samsung Omnia 7 Fundemental Problems
Custom data/power socket. This is just Samsung's fault, they do this for all their phones and it's annoying. I guess the HTC doesn't have that problem.
No external mute switch - Just a nice feature from the iPhone, it's probably patented.
Freaking huge - It's bigger than the iPhones
No RDS on radio. Apparently the chip is likely to support this, maybe the API will some day so this could be software...
Third Party Problems (I believe these will all be resolved)
No Satellite Navigation
No Runkeeper/MapMyRun
Limited facebook integration and not great Facebook app. The interesting thing about this one is that I think the app fails due to it's compliance with the WP7 application styles. It just doesn't work very well for a more complicated app.
UI Problems
No cut and paste (They've promised this soon)
Too easy to mis-press send button ( I hope they notice this, but it's right beside the space button)
No spaces allowed in Exchange usernames (dumb, exchange and Windows allows it)
No navigation when in IE landscape (odd!)
marketplace is rubbish - especially search (this is pretty unforgiveable, I think it will be resolved though)
Can't change windows live account - (silly design bug I assume, they will hopefully resolve it)
No lock timeout setting - I want my phone to lock, but preferably after I've not used it for 10 mins, not instantly
Radio interface pretty rubbish (I'm writing my own as we speak)
I prefer the UI to the iPhone one. The iPhone was the first to become really responsive but they've not moved forward from there very much. This UI looks great at the moment and has NEVER been anything but slick and stable.
Great multiple file selection for delete/move. It's a small thing, but I get a lot of spam and it's nice being able to quickly select it all and delete it all.
It has an FM radio - OK, no big thing but it is a nice to have.
Which brings me to the numero uno, most important, most spectacular feature. I don't have to buy a £1000 computer in order to be a
Not really - Linux was free, Solaris wasn't. Facebook is free. For those that don't like the whistles and bells, 'hide' them or face the fact that really, you don't like those you've selected as your friends.
Now, all they have to do is to convince 500 million people (or whatever it is FB claims today) to move over to their service that has no whistles or bells. Umm.. 1/ Build competitor 2/ Release to world 3/ ??? 4/ Complete and utter failure.
One of the amazing things about Wave is that it brings the amazing new technology of character by character chat! Oh, except that's how 'talk' used to work decades ago, before the phrase IM was invented!
OK, for chatting with friends, can't see it catching on. Which is a pity because that massively limits it's userbase which in turn means way fewer non-geeks using it, and so less opportunities for it to be a de-facto communication tool where it might work.
Where's that? One volounteer group I work with has a lot of non-working individuals in it. They're not used to being copied in any mail that vaguely might include them in the set of 'people who give a shit about this'. They get home, see a huge pile of mass-group emails and pretty much delete the lot of them.
The ad-hoc Wiki nature of a Wave interests me. For an event we're organising, we could create a wave and people could chip in to each relevant part of it. as new people come on board, include them on the wave. The chairman role gets reduced to trying to maintain a reasonable structure to where everything goes.
Now, the big question. Anyone got an invite? ;)
Your kid is going to hate you for having such a boring job. There's little or no way you can spin it. My wife, who's long haul cabin crew, did a presentation and was loved, there's no WAY I'm ever gonna be stupid enough to try to follow that.
I guess you could put together a montage of footage from The Matrix and other movies and pretend that that's how you use computers.
A number of years ago the Whitehouse roof was indeed photoshopped - to a single colour for the whole surface. Nowadays it looks pretty untouched to me.
I've not been to Vegas since 2001 and to be honest, I'm pretty sad that I won't get to do the ST experience again. It was fantastic with one of the best 'wow' moments ever served up by any theme park ride I've ever been on.
Oh well, saves me having to go anywhere near the pit that is LV: Hilton I guess, least time spent that end of the strip the better :)
For what it's worth, the 404 error page being served on http://www.google.com/chrome is not their standard one - their standard one is to search for the whole url from the looks of things?
How about this for an idea - open source the code - I'm sure they'll find some pro-government coders out there willing to spend the 6-8hrs (max) that's probably required to write a routine to achieve this. Everyone likes a challenge :)
That's even cheaper than minimum wage.
What is scarier, the fact that they're stupid enough to write these tactics down in a published manual, or that those involved are stupid enough that they need to have them written down for them?
War sucks, the problem is that we're taken to war, the symptom is the abuses that take place. Better to cure the problem than treat the symptom.