Showing 1 - 4 of 4
Celebrating 30 years of Windows
Life, James Hein, Published on 02/12/2015
» Back in 1985, on Nov 20, Windows 1.0 was released by Microsoft. This was not the first graphic, mouse click-based operating system at the time but it has certainly become the most common. Back then you needed two floppy disks, DOS 2.0, 256K of memory and a graphics card. Around 500,000 copies were sold. It took until about the mid 90s before Windows took off and the first popular version was Windows 3.11. It was recently found still running in France's Orly airport running a weather system. It is also still used in point of sales systems and a few other places.
When free Wi-Fi isn't really free
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/07/2015
» I've been doing some travelling recently and I've been taking some notice of the availability of Wi-Fi in international airports. Arriving in Singapore for example I was expecting free Wi-Fi at the airport but while it claimed to be it wasn't. To gain access you have to login, enter your mobile phone number and feed in the returning information from the SMS. Depending on your mobile roaming charges, and if you have roaming turned on at all, this can be somewhat costly for allegedly free Wi-Fi. Arriving at Jakarta airport the free Wi-Fi was both free and did not require any of these hoops to be navigated before accessing. Bottom line: Wi-Fi in Jakarta was much easier to use than in Singapore, which might sound counter-intuitive but based on my experience at least is true. In the age of voice over the internet the whole concept of huge phone and data charges is just plain wrong anyway. On the positive side for Singapore, buying an inexpensive voice and data plan for a couple of weeks was very reasonably priced. Also on the return journey I found that you can get a password in Singapore using a computer terminal, so access if you're not in a hurry.
Web standard development in the pipeline
Life, James Hein, Published on 16/07/2014
» Samsung, Dell, Intel, Broadcom and others have started the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) with the aim of uniting on standards for internet development. Or, in their own words, “will seek to define a common communication framework based on industry standard technologies to wirelessly connect and intelligently manage the flow of information among devices, regardless of form factor, operating system or service provider” and “it is our intention to create a specification and an open source project that will allow interoperability for all types of devices and operating systems”. For the moment this announcement is about there is to it, with more information to follow later.
Notes on my notebook
Database, James Hein, Published on 23/06/2010
» So, after many years, I have a new notebook. I settled on the Acer TM 6293-A3G32Mn. It also marks my personal foray into the world of Windows 7. I like the notebook because it comes with Win 7 Pro instead of the usual Win 7 Home edition. There are a number of reasons for this including the support for the virtual Windows XP and all the other features that a Pro version of Windows brings over the generally useless Home versions.