I used to be of this mind until I got given a power users laptop that apparently was made out a hollowed out paving slab.
Posts by david bates
474 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Feb 2008
HP reveals bonkers $5k foldable tablet/laptop/desktop
IBM Software tells workers: Get back to the office three days a week
Did you re-write their contract when you had to close your office and everyone had to work from home to stop the company collapsing under COVID?
When the next lockdown hits (and it will) do you think that all the workers being forced back to the office will be willing to upend their homes lives again to help an organization that has no ineterst in quid pro quo?
Local governments aren't businesses – so why are they force-fed business software?
Linux on the Arm-based Thinkpad X13S: It's getting there
Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads
UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program
Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet
Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine
Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia
Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts
Re: Fancy that
Or if you live in Crewe...
Warning - your house is part of a major development that was built on a site used for building and maintaining trains for 200 years and we didn't bother to make sure the developer did the paperwork around decontamination so we don't know what's going on and your house is worthless.
Capita IT breach gets worse as Black Basta claims it's now selling off stolen data
McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs
Inadequate IT partly to blame for NHS doctors losing 13.5 million working hours
Infosec still (mostly) a boys club
Ridiculous.
Do hospitals not have emergency response? Do they not have the concept of things under attack? Are nurses not taught about disease vectors and threats?
Are women not able to get on in the armed forces because of the real military 'machismo' or is it just the pseudo bit they find offputting?
How many areas of IT actually expose one to any of those phrases? Id imagine your average tester, developer, web designer etc wouldnt know a threat vector from a dustpan and brush.
No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron
Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker
UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok
Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave
How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT
God of War: How do you improve on perfection? You port it to PC, obviously
With just over two weeks to go, Microsoft punts Windows 11 to Release Preview
Re: oh really?
Not QUITE true.
Mint, for no particular reason, has suddenly decided it has no printers installed and throws a error when I try and install the printer it was using quite happily the other week.
Also Mint claims to be adjusting the screen brightness on my Thinkpad, but in reality is doing no such thing.
Google’s made-for-India cut of Android and the one phone that runs it delayed by chip shortages, testing
Re: Should the OS really require so much power?
Android isn't that light.
My Kobo reader has a 1Ghz ARM simply to handle the network connectivity and display a book. It has a web browser, but that's miserably slow, and it runs a cut down version of Android.
Windows 3.1 could do that and multitask on a 25Mhz 386 With 4mb of RAM, and do it with aplomb.
Xiaomi parties like a winner after coming second on world smartphone sales charts
Re: Hard work and good products
I've just bought a Redmi Note 10 Pro.
Pretty good so far - some niggles - the antenna is nowhere near as good as my old Zenfone 4, and proximity sensor seems a bit hit and miss, and for some reason it often thinks I want settings when honestly I don't.
I can't see me paying Samsung prices for a comparable phone though.
Home Office slams PNC tech team: 'Inadequate testing' of new code contributed to loss of 413,000 records
Capgemini scores £150m contract to help Student Loan Company overcome its IT problems 5 years after £50m superfail
Re: How hard can it be?
You would be amazed.
I'm currently using a government portal to register products. The EU portal was horrible... The GB portal... Well....
It asks I've question per page
It does allow you to go back and change the details on previous pages
It does not use the questions you've answered to filter responses it presents you with later on.
You can add up to 10 images, but you have to add them all at once... It's a one shot deal.
And, hilariously in 2021, it does not allow you to edit the record you have just created in any way. You can delete it, but you can't edit it.
Apparently the record editing is coming. And they're working VERY HARD on it.
As it stands the website would fail as an assignment in an A level computer course. God alone knows how much it cost.
I can only assume someone's 16-year-old had a morning free to roam this together...
'Agile' F-35 fighter software dev techniques failed to speed up supersonic jet deliveries
Free Software Foundation urged to free itself of Richard Stallman by hundreds of developers and techies
Re: Oh how the woke wimper
Teen Vogue Editor Resigns After Fury Over Racist Tweets
The hiring of Alexi McCammond, who was supposed to start at the Condé Nast publication next week, drew complaints because of racist and homophobic tweets she had posted a decade ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/business/media/teen-vogue-editor-alexi-mccammond.html
Forced out for a tweet she made while an idiot teenager? Sounds like cancel culture to me....
The world's first Apple Silicon iMac is actually a Mac Mini
Qualcomm under fire for 'anticompetitive' patent shenanigans causing pricey UK smartphones
Re: Been there...
As someone with little interest in theatre and less in Ayckbourn that sounds like an appalling waste of money to me.
I have no doubt Ayckbourn could easily have chucked 500k at the theatre without missing it and the money could have been spent on a project that helped the wider community, rather than a subset with the time, money and inclination to go and see some rather dull plays.
Well...its saves 20 minutes from Birmingham. Which doesn't help much if the cost of a ticket remains much, much more expensive than going by car, which it will.
Of course, if the railways had a reliable wireless service we could - I dunno - work on the train and negate those 20 minutes. Or just work from home like we're doing now...
Microsoft unveils swappable SSDs for Surface Pro 7+ but 'strongly discourages' users from upping their capacity
No ports, no borders, no hope: Xiaomi's cool but impractical all-screen concept phone
The Novell NetWare box keeps rebooting over and over again yet no one has touched it? We're going on a stakeout
Re: Fluorescents...
My Philips TV broke 11 months into its warrantee period. I had tilted it forward to plug something in and the sound bar in front of it poked a hole in the screen :(
The only other Philips thing I had issues with was a food processor, which gave me shocks when it was UNPLUGGED. Philips diagnosed a blown resistor which was stopping a capacitor from discharging, and swapped it out for a new top of the range non-shocky food processor.
Stony-faced Google drags Android Things behind the cowshed. Two shots ring out
Re: A thought
My Kobo runs an ancient version of Android (much cut down, and no Googlyness), and comes with a browser. Browsing on an eInk screen is NOT a joyous experience.
It does mean that if I'm desperate I can do all he heavy lifting of getting books on my mobile, file up a web server, and get books onto the Kobo using HTML...but the eInk screen is slow, and the processor is slow....its not fun.
Imagine things are bad enough that you need a payday loan. Then imagine flaws in systems of loan lead generators leave your records in the open... for years
Calls for 'right to repair' electronics laws grow louder across Europe
Re: UK Govt changed the rules...
Yeah I bought a Ninja food processor - a good one. £150 ish IIRC. A tiny clip broke on the lid about a month out of warrantee. The Amazon reviews mentioned this being an issue. Ninja said "no longer made, out of warrantee, parts not available, not our problem". Amazon, bless them, stepped up the plate and gave me a full refund. Ninja and associated brands have lost my business for good. Shame, because it was the best food processor I'd even had and had some nice features.
Re: Go away boy, you bother me.
You do know, don't you, that we'll be able to pick and choose what laws we have? If it makes sense to piggyback on EU standards then we will.
Of course, you may be right, and countries like New Zealand, who are not in the EU are riddled with lethal electronics and cars assembled from random scrap. It does seem more likely however that most of these standards are pretty common across the world, hence the same TVs etc being sold globally.
Is this news to you, are are you just here to talk crap about Brexit?
A visit to a crafted webpage would have been enough for a bad guy to munch all your Firefox for Android cookies
Worn-out NAND flash blamed for Tesla vehicle gremlins, such as rearview cam failures and silenced audio alerts
Dulux feel lucky, punk? Samsung wades into paint world with interior emulsions designed to 'complement' your, er, TV
Yes its Ambilight. Even cleverer it'll hook into Philips Hue, and you can assign different bulbs to different positions on the TV frame, so you can throw Ambilight to cover the entire room, should you wish. It works well.
I did read they're opening the tech up to different manufacturers, which makes sense as to get the whole room effect you need to buy a Philips Hue Hub and associated bulbs.
Dell: 60% of our people won't be going back into an office regularly after COVID-19
Re: So the next logical step is...
> This "new normal" looks quite abnormal for humanity, if I may be so ambitious in expressing myself.
Except that until fairly recently it was ENTIRELY normal for humanity. 200 years ago many people didn't travel more than a few miles outside their village. Even a hundred years ago most people wouldn't be popping to their local city.
For a lot of us the only reason we go into cities is to work, and then we get out as soon as we can. The internet has, thank God, reduced the need to go in to shop. The cities can go hang - I can see this new life invigorating towns that have for the last 100 years been drained into the local big city.
Intel couldn't shrink to 7nm on time – but it was able to reduce one thing: Its chief engineer's employment
UK's Co-operative Group to centralise IT teams across various divisions, warns redundancies 'inevitable'
Re: Boo
Not evil?
Even ignoring the Crystal Methodist CoOp try to chase out local business. In Crewe an undertaker opened a site. Co Op funerals opened next door, and then closed when the independent didn't fold. Turns out they weren't bothering to embalm people either, so refunds had to be given, which is beside the point.
Their shops are hugely expensive and their own brand stuff is rubbish.
The whole ethical thing is a whitewash as far as I can see, and they're not a company I do business with.
Heir-to-Concorde demo model to debut in October
O2 be a fly on the wall during BT and Vodafone's video calls: Telefónica's UK biz, Virgin Media officially merge
Re: Ha ha
I won't - I moved from O2s just about acceptable network to GiffGaff, which was obviously the same network , but with less reliability (somehow) and 'ask the person sitting next to you on the bus - perhaps they can help...?' customer support. A plague on BOTH their houses.
I jumped ship to 3 and haven't looked back.