Discussions

The correct form is 'Microsoft is...'

This is because we're talking about Microsoft as a single thing.

But no  one will shoot you for saying, 'Microsoft are...'

31 minutes ago, Maddus Mattus wrote

@Ray7: no, actually. Battery can only take and supply one voltage.

Yup.

So voltage transformation has to be done inside the laptop. That's why there is a forced airflow.

That's why the cord is so thin.

 

Riiggghhht.

 Makes you wonder how Apple managed to cram all that into a case the width of a bread knife.

5 hours ago, magicalclick wrote

@fabian:

to be realistic, X360 is the loudest of current gen system.

@cbae:

I guess macbook power cords are unnecessarily thin.

The Macbook can get away with it because it runs on a sort of dual supply.

If there is no power cable plugged in then it runs on battery.

If there is a power cable plugged in then it runs from the mains AND the battery...all while it's charging the battery.

Which is part of the reason why the battery isn't removable. Does make for a tiny power brick though. 

Maybe Microsoft could fit a battery to the XBOX. Call it the XBOX-Hybrid.

17 hours ago, BitFlipper wrote

*snip*

How up-to-date are those statistics? I'm asking because I'm sure the failure rate has been decreasing over the years since they keep coming up with new methods and technologies.

Good point, and very hard to find the real stats on this. The private clinics reckon the failure rate is about 1 in 1000. The British Journal of Ophthalmology puts the figure at 1 in 10. 

I have a feeling the failure rate is less than one in twenty these days. Also one has to define "failure". I guess one can call my wife's 1st go around a failure as she didn't hit the exact amount of required correction but the second time she did.

Another good point. 'Failure' is defined as 'it didn't work', which doesn't necessarily mean that the recipient was harmed in any way. However there are rare cases of blindness, less rare cases of vision becoming worse, and quite a few cases of night vision becoming so impaired that the patient can no longer drive in the dark.

The most common problem is 'dry eyes' which seems to happen a lot, but can be corrected apparently.

7 hours ago, DeathByVisualStudio wrote

@BitFlipper: I'm over 40 and just had my eyes zapped this past December. I too have/had bad astigmatism so it was nice to get rid of that. I went the mono-vision route where they poke one of your eyes out -- kidding -- where they leave one eye less corrected for reading and the other eye dialed in for distance (as the doc put it, your shooting eye). It has worked fantastic. My near vision at the computer has never been better and my distance is great too. I haven't had any problems with changing focal distance so it probably depends on the person (knock on wood) I'm hoping to get 7 to 10 years out of these babies before I have to go back in and get a correction. Most likely it will be to dial in the reading eye for distance and move on to reading glasses. It is so nice not to have to deal with finicky toric lenses anymore.

Wow. People keep telling me to ditch the contact lenses and go for eye surgery. Dunno. I hear that these things go wrong one in twenty. Those are good odds, but I wasn't born lucky...

I wear disposable contacts and they're no hassle at all, as long as you scrub your hands thoroughly before putting them in or taking them out.

@GoddersUK:

This

Exception Lists: Like the vast majority of search engines, in some cases our algorithms falsely identify sites and we sometimes make limited exceptions to improve our search quality.

is there universal get-out clause, and if Siri were actually a search engine then this the same one Apple would be using too.

11 hours ago, BitFlipper wrote

I guess the measure of a CEO's success is now how the company's shiny baubles do in the market. So if the company doesn't have a bauble factory at all, then the CEO must be a complete failure. By that measure, all other CEOs are failures except Apple's CEO.

And the fact that Windows 7 is the fastest selling OS in history carries no weight at all.

One would think these people are smarter than that and would recognize which company's software is powering the world's businesses. That software is certainly not coming from the Bauble Factory....

Yeah, that doesn't actually prove he's a good CEO though does it? All that was in place when Gates was running the show (even the XBox - though not the Kinnect). What has he done himself to put his mark on the company?

12 hours ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

FIFY

Good point. Ta.

5 hours ago, Blue Ink wrote

@BitFlipper: it depends; since there are a metrics by which the iPhone can be considered "better" than WP7 (marketshare, for instance), it could be argued that that statistical method wasn't representative in that specific case, so that's a "flaw" that needed fixing.

It's statistics, what did you expect?

They expected Apple to give Nokia some much needed advertising - for free. 

@cbae:LOL indeed!

which is the result of MS TellMe running over Bing. So who's right? 

Now will MS alter the result? I doubt it because Nokia has already tried to stir up a fuss over this.

But would MS do it? Of course they would, because like Apple, they're not above changing the rules to suit themselves.