Posts by david bates

HP reveals bonkers $5k foldable tablet/laptop/desktop

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.

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?

Re: (debits still go in the column nearest the window).

Why would that be a problem when being called out for wasting millions on vanity projects only leads to payrises all round?

Linux on the Arm-based Thinkpad X13S: It's getting there

You forgot the obligatory "Why would you want to do that anyway? You should be doing THIS, which does not give you the result you're after but I misunderstood the question"

Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox open to all: Now websites can tap into your habits directly for ads

Re: Another win for Brexit

Jesus Christ its been six years and we can implement any rules we like. If you don't like Brexit perhaps you should have worked a bit harder to prevent it.

Re: Sneaky

Try telling that to the NP&I website if you try and use Firefox Mobile. Spoofing the user agent works so it really is a case of "We can't be bothered to test this".

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

Re: "it wanted to pursue a domestic fusion energy strategy"

There are multiple companies "going solo" on this. Do you believe there is only one possible way to achieve fusion?

Concorde? Pffft. NASA wants a Mach 4 passenger jet

Re: The real problem with Concorde.....

It always amazes me that even now there are about 8 supercruise capable aircraft according to Wiki, and Concorde could supercruise faster than any of them.

Re: Civilian spend on, uh...

"Reaction Engines' revolutionary pre-cooler."

It seems to have gone quiet on that front in the last few years, which suggests to me its being used in a black project. Skylon was always a red herring when the real market was always going to be military.

Re: This project must not be allowed to happen

Boeing have already demonstrated their inability to build an SST, so thats OK.

Time running out for crew of missing Titanic tourist submarine

Re: Transponder

Google 'people killed by their own inventions'

Hubris is a thing

Online Safety Bill age checks? We won't do 'em, says Wikipedia

Re: Most harmful thing to children in the UK

I'd imagine getting buggered by Cyril Smith was quite harmful to children, even discounting the inevitable crush injuries, and he wasn't a Tory...

We like to be shown the errors. The man knows his audience.

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

Re: Reputational damage

Actually Brexit was built on stories of an EU wide armed forces, which we were assured was silly and would never happen.... Care to put your house on it not happening...?

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

Re: Your privilege is showing

If you really live that far from the countryside there is nothing to stop you hiking round the points of in your city, in your trainers. Very few people live within walking distance of forests or moors.

As for the maps? Please...Bing even has an OS Map overlay.

Inadequate IT partly to blame for NHS doctors losing 13.5 million working hours

Re: Noooo!

Ah the new government framework or whatever its called that HMRC, Companies house etc use.

One question per screen

On a standard laptop a scroll required to find the Next button

Every.Single.Time.

Brilliant.

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

Re: Party Smalltalk

"i can try, but Im a tester. I'm LITERALLY paid to break things.."

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

Re: We're all wise in retrospect

Are there few of those? My Thinkpad certainly has a Ryzen sticker on it, and it was hardly difficult to find AMD machines from major manufacturers.

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Re: government

How about if your kids are found watching porn etc, and you can't prove you took steps to try and avoid that happening you face a penalty.

Trio of Rust Core Team members take their leave

Re: Fashions

Thats fascinating. As someone limited to BASIC and bits of python with a bit of context I could understand what all of those code snippets were doing apart from the RUST. I couldn't make head not tail of that...

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

Re: Marked up

Spectrum 128 managed it - no idea if it did bank switching, but if a 1980s home cuptre nailed together in Cambridge could do it I'm sure its not rocket science.

God of War: How do you improve on perfection? You port it to PC, obviously

Well yes, an x86 Mac is a pc.

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

Re: Realities

T'was ever this....

"Where's your documentation?

"..."

"..."

"Oh. In that case we're Agile"

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

>implemented religiously

Unfortunately not. Too often its either used as an excuse to cut corners, to wing it, or if it starts off with good intentions to wing it when things start going pearshaped. I've worked on several projects where 'agile' meant 'we're not document - well - anything'.

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

Re: Wow

I took a 7 bay networked SCSI CDROM box with a top mounted PSU, took an angle grinder to it as well, fitted a new PSU AND a micro-ATX board in the old PSU enclosure and filled the rest of the box with HDDs to make a NAS.

Can I have an award as well please?

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

Re: Windows and Storage space

Yup - after the second time of trying to fix it my response was "If you want my help with your computers do not buy them without reference to me. This PoS was on sale for a reason....."

No ports, no borders, no hope: Xiaomi's cool but impractical all-screen concept phone

Re: Yes

Pebble watches have this - a magnet holds the changing gadget in place on the side of the watch very effectively

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

Re: On the bright side

Exactly this - why would I not just flex my god credit rating and take out the loan at 2% interest in behalf of my friend? What would I be losing?

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

Re: Won't budge from FF 68 on Android

Nope - I accidentally updated last week. Its still an abomination, so I had to revert.

If it wasn't for synching with Firefox on my desktop I'd be moving to another browser on mobile.

Worn-out NAND flash blamed for Tesla vehicle gremlins, such as rearview cam failures and silenced audio alerts

Re: We'll get used to it

Head gaskets on the K were fine until BMW stretched the engine too far and replaced the dowels with plastic versions....

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

Smaller processes as I understand it bring potential for faster chips and lower power usage.

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

Re: Can an electric powered plane fly supersonically ?

You can do it with an unshielded nuclear reactor, which is nearly electric.

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.

Review of IR35 is in: Quelle surprise, UK.gov will forge ahead with controversial tax reforms in the private sector

Re: complete ****show

And the construction industry, entertainment industry, oil industry.....Google News IR35 related stuff on my feed and it comes from all over. Its not just an IT problem.