Howard Oakley

No business like snow business

by Howard Oakley on 13 May 2010 in Help

Recent heavy snow almost ground the UK to a halt, so while the memory is still fresh, we must implement better contingency plans for the future. Much of the time, living in the country is a joy: turning off the lights at night reveals the black shadows of the downs cut out from the glittering [...]

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Nehalem neurosis

by Howard Oakley on 13 May 2010 in Help

Moore’s Law may argue that processors will get ever-more powerful, but until human error is taken out of the equation, this development may stall. Each year, according to their manufacturers, we expect our processors to perform faster. Although I can recall few Mac users explicitly wanting faster CPUs, we keep getting them, thanks to an [...]

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Will lasers light the way?

by Howard Oakley on 13 May 2010 in Help

Online delivery is making optical discs an endangered species, but laser technology will still have a key role to play in home entertainment. Your Mac may be composed of chips, but it takes light to make it work. That light shines not only from the screen in front of your eyes, but from lasers onto [...]

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Onward and upgrade

by Howard Oakley on 13 May 2010 in Help

Software vendors should make a New Year’s resolution to ensure that upgrades and updates to their products are more user-friendly. How did your wall calendar update go, then? Have you found any incompatibilities between Calendar 2010 and 2009? Or worse, did Calendar 2010 crash repeatedly until you applied patches to February and September? Assuming that [...]

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No flying sauces in sight

by Howard Oakley on 13 May 2010 in Help

When times are hard, success in business comes through innovation, not just change. To survive, companies must not repeat past mistakes. One of the most delightful but annoying human traits is our apparent pleasure in repeating common mistakes. One autumn evening, when I was tucking into a chilli at a Little Chef along the A303, [...]

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Colouring the issue

by Howard Oakley on 13 May 2010 in Help

Colour management can be a chaotic business, and often what we see on our printouts isn’t what we should get. It’s hard to imagine a world without colour, just as it’s hard to think of a subject that’s more intractably controversial in the computing world than colour management. From the ostensibly simple problem of naming [...]

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