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Showing posts from February, 2017

It's Back.

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Mobile World Congress 2017 saw the return of Nokia with consumer mobile devices. Nokia has been restricted on producing mobile phones over recent years because Microsoft bought the brand in order to save Windowsphone. The story is full of irony. Nokia had been late to understand how much the smartphone industry changed with the iphone. Over the years it had about 50% of the mobile phone market globally and had a massive design, distribution and manufacturing base. Such a huge infrastructure meant high quality and end to end control. Unfortunately Nokia had internal battles. It's own Symbian OS was not really able to produce the new devices inspired by Apple and the mobile internet. Some of it's engineers wanted to turn to a Linux based OS called Meego . As smartphones dominated sales and Nokia's internal decision on the OS raged a series of decently designed but confusing smartphones came out of the company. Nokia decided it need a new CEO and Stephen Elop , a fo

835

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Mobile gets really serious in 2017 with the 835 . The new Qualcomm processor is likely to be seen on almost all new flagship mobile phones this year with the first outing at Mobile World Congress . The significance is the growth of ARM as the primary design for processors on power restricted mobile devices. Rdeuced instruction set processors didn't lead the PC revolution in the 1980s because desktop PCs had big beefy power supplies, fans, and lots of space. Intel designed ever faster processors with ever larger fans to disperse heat. The problem with mobile devices is that they are not permanently attached to huge power supplies, they need to be very small and have little space to get rid of heat. This has meant performance took a second place to power. Meanwhile Intel was unable to make viable low power chips. The Intel Atom processor was put on a number of devices but was unpopular because it felt to be under-performing. The 835 could be the mobile processor that can a

Powershell Doesn't Run Scripts "Out of the Box"

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Most people think that Powershell is a "scripting language" but when you install the current version the first thing you notice is that you can't run scripts. In fact you are more likely to see errors like this. " Install.ps1 cannot be loaded because the execution of scripts is disabled on this system." The first reaction to this could be something less polite than "Hey I thought this thing did scripts". However scripting has a history in Microsoft that makes this completely normal. In the beginning Microsoft was a languages company. It wrote computer programming languages for operating systems. It got pushed into operating systems with the launch of the IBM PC and DOS (Disk Operating System). With this the first ' batch language' came into play. You could put a few commands into a file with the extension 'bat' and it would run. The 'autoexec.bat' ran automatically if it was present when a PC booted. The command proc