Posts by Christopher Reeve's Horse 333 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2008
Yeah, likely to be way I suspect, but hopefully some good may come of it in the shape of consumer awareness and pressure?
From a 'dumb' consumer perspective, the lack of software updates to things like Android phones and tablets is typically blind - the increased risk to un-patched vulnerabilities does not manifest itself in an meaningful way to most users. However, when services just stop working despite the hardware being perfectly ok, this is likely to cause anger and resentment. Enough anger to change manufacturer's behaviour?
What this could represent is a longer term shift in how consumers think about warranties. Traditionally, once a warranty expires, the lifespan of the product comes down to a mix of how well you look after it and pure luck. Is there a future where products themselves purposely stop working once the warranty expires? Will price differentiation carry Apple indefinitely as their estate of supported models continues to increase? How long do we have until updates as a paid for subscription service become the norm?
Given the proliferation of IOT tat, its going to be nearly impossible to ensure they’re all constantly updated. On the other hand, why is it nearly impossible for a layman to set up a locked down separate home network where devices can be isolated from each other and or the rest of the network/internet?
...and would be perfect for driving sims. FOV is really important for getting the look, feel and immersion of driving right, and often getting a good FOV setting on a single monitor means compromising on lateral spatial awareness from the driving position. Just being able to look around at will, and without having the additional faff of base stations setup sounds great. I've never been much tempted by Occulus because it still feels very much like a first generation product that's been stagnant for quite some time now.
Man responsible for least popular iteration of Windows UI uses [insert here] as a desktop
Some starters for 10: Underside of desk. Pulped yams. Actual rolling green grass hill and blue sky. The baby eating Bishop of Bath and Wells. Alan Yentob. The hopes and dreams of children. etc.
These speeds and capacities are the capability of the interface, not the actual flash storage on the card. How far behind the curve is the existing tech, even if this interface is used?
At the moment a 1TB Sandisk SD card with a 170 Mb/s interface is more than £460. Scaling linearly for storage alone (I know it's a bad example) your 128TB card is going to cost nearly £60,000. But if this ever does become affordable then paying for Cloud storage becomes a bit pointless, you could be feasibly be running a 0.5PB portable NAS server from your phone over 7G.
Yes, but the users aren't always doing this out of blind stupidity. A 'corporate' system always crystallises to a particular scope, and inevitably the outputs need to be viewed, or post-processed, or further modelled along with other non-corporate data. Not all the the data can be crystallised into the main system, as - in almost every case - these are the areas where the processes are being actively designed and developed to the needs of the decision makers. Sometimes this just never stops long enough for crystallisation to be feasible.
Excel enables a combination of roles - process design and decision making. This is almost always necessary when the process constantly evolves or never settles to a particular steady state. To separate these roles requires more resources and stability of the process, and comes of the expense of flexibility. And whilst an excel output lacks the control of a more formal system, these controls (validation, repeatability, ISO9001 etc.) can be built into the system by a competent enough end-user.
You may mock, but I'm just stating a valid and true opinion. There's a lot of digital transformation going on in my business (amongst other things) and Yammer has been a useful engagement tool for various communities and user groups.
P.S. Incidentally, CV's and 'job opportunities' are much more of a Linked-In thing, so at least try and mock on target.
Well that's just it isn't it... We always assume that the latest software and patches are reasonable, we did 20 years ago too.
What worries me is - what is this kind of article going to look like in another 20 years? Will the security threats of 2020 be seen as quaint? Will the attack surface always continue to expand, or will a point ever be reached where the problem of reliable computer security has effectively been solved? Answers on a postcard, or preferably in a flash embedded object in an .xls file...
I completely agree, but aside from the popular manta of avoiding all IOT kit, how is the average consumer supposed to tell if a piece of kit requires an external network to operate? Remembering of course that the average consumer is still smarter than 50% of all the other consumers.
I don’t know what it is with Microsoft these days, there's clearly been huge progress with features, functionality and integration, but there's just so much change, and it's all at different stages for different clients. It feels like features are constantly being re-bundled, re-worked, re-branded and re-named. I'm not saying progress isn't good, but it's the way that it’s done - it's disorientating and un-engaging for end users. Sure, you got used to X, but now X is Y, but not all of X is Y, and some of Z is now Y too, but only if you weren’t subscribed to Y in the first place etc... It's enough to give me the Ballmer sweats.
Sorry, my mistake. I thought making snide comments on the back of highly selective source material was the very raison d'etre of the El Reg comments board? :)
Aside from that, I feel I have, on occasion, made some arguably useful contributions to various IT themed discussions in places where I can. I'm sure we'd all rather avoid the converse situation where commentary was vetted to only professional opinions from recognised experts - but that's mostly the domain of the articles themselves. And so it comes to the very crux of the problem of democratic free speech; to what degree should the extreme opinions of society be heard, and who could possibly be qualified to vet or censor these? Apologies that I haven't contributed, in your eyes, at the standards of the very best, but in many cases the very best are already saying the right things and all I can offer is a mere upvote. Furthermore, if the quality of my somewhat uncontroversial posts are being brought into question, then I can only assume (admittedly as a limited sample) that the overall health of debate here is generally excellent. Now, it's Friday afternoon already, there's drinking to be done, and more snide comments to be made! Cheers, and have a good weekend.
Th Hi-Fi world can far far exceed any cycling madness... A 12 grand bike? Peanuts. Take a look of these cables:
https://www.jordanacoustics.co.uk/products/cables/ultimate-dream-3m-pair
A single 3m pair. If you're planning on tri-wiring 6 monoblocks to your speakers (because at this level, you just should) you'll need 3 sets, running in at a total of £162,180.00 Just for the speaker cables on a two channel stero setup.
They're the only wheels that can connect to the chassis via the proprietary iAxle fitting?
Also, considering the price, they're not very functional. apparently they lack a brake mechanism. If your smooth floor isn't perfectly flat, away rolls your expensive Mac Pro. Needs matching iChocks (a bargain at £199).
Don't join the rush, start selling shovels.
Piffy aphorisms aside, why would anyone trust a guide to fraud that's sold by fraudsters? Honour amongst thieves? Do they have some sort of 5 star ratings and review system? I barely trust reviews on most of the 'normal' internet (the Light Web?).
Yes, it's old news, and yes, it's bleeding obvious - but it's still a problem, and the problem is getting worse not better. And yes, why not Smart TV's too? It if helps the wider public actually understand there's an issue then there's an improved chance that consumer pressure might influence a change in manufacturer (or regulator) behaviour. The environmental damage of wasteful smartphone production is too much of an issue - you're stealing my future, how dare you! ;-)
Both manufacturers and Google are to blame really. Google's design of the update process put the manufacturers in control, who then have no incentive to apply updates to older hardware. I agree that the Android One system should improve things, but how many consumers even know what that is? And why only 3 years? I get that handsets are more likely to suffer greater wear and tear, but why should there be any limit? Google don't exactly have a good track record here, remember that they are now imposing limited lifespans and expiration dates on Chromebooks.
My >10 year old Core i3 laptop has Windows 10 and all the latest updates. Admittedly it's a bit shit, but it works, and it's reliable and secure. How many Android handsets are usefully operable at the age of 3, never mind 10+ years. If the likes of Samsung et al think I'd splurge laptop prices (and decent laptops at that) on a phone that become obsolete irrespective of how well I care for it, then they've got another thing coming.
I wasn't suggesting that overwriting a user selected search engine choice was a good thing, I was suggesting that integrating web search with results from internal business data stored in Office 365
might not necessarily be a bad thing. I'm sorry that you don't necessarily understand threaded conversations.
This might be controversial, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
If a company is fully bought into the Office 365 services already then all the information is already being indexed - and that's happening because of a policy / choice by the company to use the these services rather than a case of inappropriate data hording. It's effectively sanctioned and expected behaviour.
Bing is, in this case, just one of the search channels an end user could use.
Until I eventually realised that the brand has never been able to live up to the nostalgia associated with it. It's now just a paid for label that increasingly shit companies are using in turn, each wringing another drop of blood out of it. Come back Nolan and your Age of Aquarius! Time Warner ruined it initially by not foreseeing the original VCS would become obsolete, Jack Tramiel gave it a reasonably good shot in the ST era, and really, ever since the ill fated Jaguar it's been rather a torrid affair.
I'd be all up for a buying an amazing new Atari device, but this isn't it. What the 'new' VCS ought to be is a nostalgia machine, similar to the mini SNES and Megadrives recently seen. With simple modern hardware you could easily emulate all the various history of Atari machines and back catalogues of popular games - and maybe even as a major differentiator, include creativity software too. A pocket sized Atari ST with a MIDI sequencer anyone?
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