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> however most people I know working in 3d, digital illustration or video work all use windows machines now.

You can stick really fast processors, tons of RAM and one or two Nvidia graphics cards in a very cheap tower. If only Apple sold a cheesegrater-style tower that could do that ;-)

Thee are even some Windows laptops that do the job now. Wirecutter picked the Dell XPS 15 as The Best 15-Inch Laptop for Photo and Video Editing https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-15-inch-laptops-for-p...

scholiaon Introducing Surface Book 2

(1) Superfish isn't a Chinese company -- it was founded in Tel Aviv and moved to Palo Alto; (2) Superfish wasn't installed on ThinkPads; (3) it wasn't on Lenovo laptops for long: they uninstalled it and apologised.

scholiaon Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

Agreed. My anecdotal experience is that the number of low quality sites has increased dramatically.

I put this down partly to the "freshness" algorithm. You get shown the most appalling crap on the grounds that it appeared within the past few hours.

If you're a share cropper in the news blogosphere, it's stupid to spend an hour checking facts or making phone calls because then you'll be 50th to post. Post any old crap and you reap the financial rewards of "freshness".

I exaggerate only slightly....

scholiaon Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

iOS market share in the UK is generally over 40% and has approached 50%.

http://uk.kantar.com/tech/mobile/2017/april-great-britain-sm...

scholiaon Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

Android market share in Europe is around 75%. When you have a monopoly market share, you get treated differently, as Microsoft found.

Otherwise, Google wasn't found guilty of anything to do with software or apps. It was found guilty of abusing its monopoly market power by promoting its own shopping comparison service at the expense of rivals.

I think we all expect Google to deliver honest and fair search results. When it delivers results that favor its own properties, users are being cheated.

scholiaon Google's $19B Black Box Is Worrying Investors

Unix ;-)

scholiaon IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

Why? The company has reported declining revenues for 21 quarters -- more than five years -- is shedding tens of thousands of staff, doesn't generally pay high wages, has no market-leading products, and has a less sexy image than Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and practically every other significant IT company.

(I did say American developers, not Indian developers....)

scholiaon IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

I have no idea, but a quick Google turns up lots of stories like this:

http://www.deccanchronicle.com/world/america/040417/shock-to...

scholiaon IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

Do you know Numbeo?

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cit...

scholiaon IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

Depends if you mean in the City of London, in Greater London, "on the tube" or "inside the M25" ;-)

Apparently you can get a 2-bedroom flat in Bexley for £150,000....

The 10 cheapest places to buy in London: where to find the best-value homes in the capital, from Barking and Dagenham to Hounslow http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/buying/londo...

scholiaon IBM Now Has More Employees in India Than in the U.S

Do really good American developers actually want to work for IBM? Serious question....

scholiaon Beyond Peace and Quiet – An Addiction to Silence (2008)

Very interesting!

"This is an edited extract from A Book Of Silence, by Sara Maitland, published by Granta on November 13 at £17.99. To order a copy for £16.99, including UK mainland p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875."

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Silence-Sara-Maitland/dp/18470...

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Silence-Sara-Maitland/dp/1582436...

scholiaon Text-only CNN

You can get news feeds as a web page in various places such as Dave Winer's River of News http://radio3.io/rivers/

Light, ad-free and totally trustworthy ;-)

scholiaon Text-only CNN

CNN is a decent news organization. It may not be the best, but it's a very long way from being the worst....

scholiaon Text-only CNN

Yes. In particular, Google's search were much better for ordinary users who didn't do complex searches....

scholiaon The web, on this day 10 years ago

Original article (with interesting comments) https://web.archive.org/web/20070715031943/http://battelleme...

scholiaon Sugar-sweetened drinks with protein rich meal affect metabolism

There's a good (old) talk where Stanford's Christopher Gardner researched different diet books with 311 women.

The Battle of the Diets: Is Anyone Winning (At Losing?) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eREuZEdMAVo

The study was announced at

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2007/03/stanford-diet...

scholiaon PDF is not portable in the digital world

The point of the story is as follows:

> PDF is not portable on digital screens. It doesn’t scale. It’s not comfortable to read PDF files on a mobile or ebook readers

Arguing that PDFs are good for printing out, or better than some other format, doesn't actually address the issue ;-)

scholiaon The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)

"The floppy shuffle" as we used to call it. It's why I'd never willingly buy a system with only one drive.

The floppy shuffle on the original Mac was a particular nightmare....

scholiaon Steve Ballmer thinks tech firms should be as accountable as NBA teams

Sorry to say that I don't know. I think only the mods can change titles and URLs...

scholiaon Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

Many moons ago, I wrote a story for Red Herring magazine(I think) about European attempts to create their own versions of the Valley, so I'd thought about some of the issues. If I had to redo it now, your talk would make it a better article ;-)

scholiaon Before Silicon Valley, New Jersey Reigned As Nation's Center Of Innovation

Thanks for the YouTube link: I enjoyed your talk.

scholiaon Steve Ballmer thinks tech firms should be as accountable as NBA teams

The link goes to Slashdot. The article is at Backchannel (on Medium) https://backchannel.com/steve-ballmer-says-tech-firms-should...

scholiaon iPad Pro

Apple posted its first full-year iPad sales dip in fiscal 2014. Unit sales slipped 4% that year, while revenue fell 5%. The sales declines accelerated thereafter. In fiscal 2015, unit sales plunged 19% and revenue dropped by 23%. In fiscal 2016, unit sales fell another 17%, while revenue tumbled 11%. Double-digit declines along both metrics continued in the first quarter of fiscal 2017. The net result is that Apple shipped just 42.6 million iPads during the 2016 calendar year, down about 40% from the peak a few years ago. https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/02/19/is-the-ipad-dead.a...

Apple Quietly Acknowledges the iPad’s Staggering Decline http://fortune.com/2017/03/21/apple-ipad-decline/

It's been two and a half years of decline – tablets aren't coming back https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/05/tablets_arent_comin...

In an interview with The Telegraph, Cook said, "I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?" He continued: "Yes, the iPad Pro is a replacement for a notebook or a desktop for many, many people. They will start using it and conclude they no longer need to use anything else, other than their phones." http://uk.businessinsider.com/apple-ceo-tim-cook-why-would-y...

Has Apple lost interest in the Mac? http://macdailynews.com/2016/09/11/has-apple-lost-interest-i...

Has Apple Lost Interest in the Mac? http://www.kirkville.com/has-apple-lost-interest-in-the-mac/

scholiaon iPad Pro

iPad sales are down by half (in unit terms) compared with its peak. Android tablet sales are down as well.

From his previous remarks (Why would you buy a PC? etc), Tim Cook seems to want everyone to move to iOS, and the neglect of the Mac line seems to support that idea. But he's yet to show he can move the market in that direction....

scholiaon iPad Pro

Lots of us really like the 2-in-1 concept and find it incredibly useful. Last time I bought a non-touch laptop, I quickly realized my mistake and took it back for a touch-screen model.

Otherwise, the long-term plan is to transition between the old Win32 API and the new Windows Runtime (which are both part of the same OS).

The transition to the UWP isn't going very well at the moment, of course, but Microsoft didn't know how it would go when it started. However, it's a long-term play so ask me again in 10 years.

If Microsoft hadn't made the move then it would clearly be a legacy OS. As it is, Windows 10 is a cloud-integrated, continuously-updated mobile OS with sandboxed apps maintained from an app store, just like iOS and Android. It just has rather too much of the old stuff hanging around as well...

scholiaon The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)

> First time I used an IBM PC I thought it was awful.

It was a great business machine, though obviously you needed two floppy drives or, in my case, the massive 10 megabyte hard drive in the PC/XT.

You got a really great keyboard and a superb green screen, it was fast (for its day), and you had your pick of software. Lotus 1-2-3 was obviously the key program, though you needed a separate monitor for graphics. Word Perfect soon became the key word processor. Borland's Sidekick was a great utility.

You could add loads of expansion cards, and I added an extra 512K (which came as 18 chips in two plastic tubes) for only £999. This enabled the PC/XT to run Microsoft Xenix, which was the most popular Unix at the time.

I'd had an Apple II before that, with two external floppies and Apple's really crappy green screen monitor (no lower case). The PC/XT was a massive upgrade, as a business machine.

Of course, you couldn't play Choplifter with two paddles, but that wasn't a job requirement. However, you could get Microsoft Flight Simulator and, later on, DOOM and Civilization etc.

However, there was a period between the XT and/or AT when the alternatives were better, I had an Atari 720ST and a Mega 4, an Amiga 500 and a 1500, and an Acorn Archimedes. In fact, I still have some of those. It was the arrival of the 386, Windows 3 and CD-ROMs that started to finish those off.

scholiaon Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

Which simply avoids the issue I raised. How long has Linux been going?

scholiaon Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

Microsoft has already shown Photoshop running in the emulation and it boots OK. Don't know how much load it will carry but it will run.

scholiaon Qualcomm, Microsoft Announce Snapdragon 835 PCs with Gigabit LTE

There's nothing to stop any company from making its own laptops with ARM processors, designing them to run Linux, and pre-installing Linux. You could do it yourself. Maybe this is your chance to become rich and famous.

Not sure why your first thought is to ride on the back of Microsoft's work...