Posts by ElNumbre 659 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2009
Our fleet of Lenovos have the feel of 'Triggers Broom' to them.
Yes, they still work, but I'm not sure there is much left of what they came out of the factory with.
Our smaller HP fleet seems rock solid in comparison, bar a small handful of power supply failures.
The last but one generation of Mac Minis were appealing - compact, Thunderbolt, upgradable post purchase in terms of storage and RAM. But then they buggered it by making RAM soldered, and charging a not insignificant premium for the top spec model.
I shall await an iFixit teartown of the new one to see if it is user repairable or upgradeable, or if it is likely to experience the same support woes of the iMac Pro ala Linus Tech Tips, before investing, especially when there is now a lot more choice of ultra small form factor desktops.
Does the camera have an accessible standards based video stream e.g. RTMP so you're not beholden to Reolinks cloud and their long term future?
At least if you can get at the feed, then you can integrate it with the countless DVR security systems out there, or roll your own.
I used Tesco tokens to buy a Connect 7" from Tesco when they were on offer after Xmas. Actual real money removed from my wallet to purchase said item - £25.
Even if it was crap, I wouldn't be too upset and repurpose it for something, especially as it ships with a USB OTG cable, but after the event, its actually quite nice and usable. The only let down is Chrome blows on a touchscreen and also consumes all of the memory.
I recently registered a couple of .co.uk domains and was surprised that Nominet requested a copy of a passport/driving licence and billing details to be sent to them. I ignored the requests and they eventually went away, but I think my skepticism on how well they can control such personal data like that may be well founded if ICANN can get breached like this.
At least 'Europe' will know that in the mornings during the week, I tend to drive to work, and in the evenings I tend to drive home. Sometimes at the weekend, I drive to the shops, but not often as that's why the internet was already invented.
Living in an urban conurbation my vehicular movements are tracked on a daily basis thanks to ANPR, and no doubt GCHQ can see where my phone is, and where I'm accessing my web accounts from, so actually, the 2 tons of metal sat in the car park showing as a single dot amongst all the vehicular dots in Europe doesn't really bother me that much.
Or maybe I need to attend paranoia courses?
Except a lot of vendors use algorithms to generate the "random" uniqueness, and when clever people figure out what that algorithm is, the gates fall.
I guess though its difficult from a support perspective to have truly random values, as what if the config is lost, how can you get back into the device, unless said mfr then maintains a database of settings, and well, think of the world of problems that leakage can create.
That was basically my first reaction. If its the Lync Engine under the hood, and a Skype-esq interface on top then fine. If its Skype for business formerly known as Skype, then Id struggle to validate this with our business.
And no mention yet about the Lync for Room Systems and if they'll become Skype Rooms.
As far as I'm aware, there is no expectation on the post office to scan digital media passing through its network for illegal content, despite it being a potential conduit for the illicit distribution of copyright content. Although they do retain the right to open and examine packages, as far as I can tell, if something slips through the net, they're not held accountable.
So, why would an online service provider, responsible for receiving, transmitting and delivering packets be any different?
And thanks to the virtual monopoly that Openreach has on the leg between the consumer and the point of presence, money will continue to flow into BT Groups coffers despite the backhaul going on C&W.
The only way this would be exciting is if Vodafone actually released a wireless broadband package using a fixed 4G terminal with similar data allowances and costs to a traditional PSTN presented broadband offering.
I was quite surprised how dull his talk was. 24hrs later, and I'm struggling to remember a single element. of his scripted Q&A. It it wasn't Satya, I'd of walked out.
Paxo and Geldoff were very good - I was quite impressed at how eloquently Sir Bob spoke about education driving African development. Dame Stella was interesting from a personal perspective and the other three felt a bit sales-pitchy.
That said, Satya (and therefore the rest of the Microsoft collective) seems to get that Windows is not a USP anymore and the next 10-20 years in computing is to be driven by 'rent as you go' compute capability and are addressing it with the "well, you're using Microsoft servers and services, you may as well use our cloud because look how easy it is" answer.
Not sure I'll rush back next year.
I also have Three with unlimited data.
The only kick in the teeth is I get great speed everywhere, except in my office (where Id actually quite like to use the bandwidth) which varies between 60 Kbps and 400 Kbps. This means that emails, tw@ts and facebork alerts trickle down, but there is no iPlayer TV streaming for me. I can just about use the iPlayer radio if the wind is blowing in the right direction that day.
I suspect in the race to the bottom, only the services which are supported by businesses with other interests will survive, particularly at the massive compute scale. AWS has a bookstore to help them out, and Microsoft have O365 and its continual licencing to support their Azure compute cloud. The smaller players need to find a niche and play to that strength.
The other thing to bear in mind is that cloud is not necessarily cheap; in our business the break-even point between doing it on cloud and buying tin averages around 21 months. But you do move your spend from CAPEX to OPEX and you struggle to pull the eject cord once you're in flight, especially if you run a complex environment in there.
LeMe: "Oh I've got 1/2hr to have a quick game of "Gears of Forza Drift Duty before life will get in the way again"
EggsBox "Installing Updates, your console will reboot several times, not let you sign into Live, finish off the batteries in the controller and require you to delete something off the harddisk"
LeMe: "Sigh"
Apple will survive because of the bling factor,
AN Other in the Android space will survive, because they're good products (I'd bet on Samsung here)
and then you'll get a smattering of small brand or no brand companies filling out the bottom of the market. Like the home battery market, there'll be a couple of big distributors who will spend a little bit of time fettling their products and a lot of time promoting that they have better product than the competitor, whilst the bottom of the market is filled with elcheapo variations on a theme.
N.b. Microsokia I think may replace Blackberry at the Enterprise (for those below C level), simply because of Windows penetration level, but you're never going to see massive market share.
I agree; SNMP stats are so useful for diagnosing faults, particularly when trying to track down long-term trend faults that aren't shown from the noddy control panels on most devices. But no devices should be configured to answer SNMP on the WAN side by default, and the RW string should not be set to Private by default ever. Have the options configurable, but don't remove the service entirely.
I bought the Slingbox software and found that it wouldn't talk to my ancient slingbox. I used the refund service to get under the 15 minutes, but therefore didn't have any time to debug why it wasn't working, just that it wasn't. A 2hr window is better, but there should be a number of options for the developers (with a set minimum) so they can choose what they want.
Most routers ship with relatively low end hardware - a lower-end ARM or equivalent processor, a few megs of RAM, a little bit of FLASH and some radio gubbins. They don't need any more than that and do the job they're designed to do. Even if you punt the compute to the cloud, you still need a processor, some memory, some way to boot the device and some radio gubbins, even with software defined radio. You can pick up a DSL router with wifi (al be it, only 802.11g) even at PC World for less than £20 these days, so I don't get the argument of cost saving. At bulk, with no retail overheads, the cost must be far lower than that.
With ever increasing bandwidth, the processors are only going to need to get more powerful anyway to cope with squirting stuff at "the cloud". Plus, at least from my perspective when the cloud has a little lie down, it's still useful to be able to get IP addresses on my LAN segment, so for example I could view my IP webcam.
If ISPs want control over their CPE, the existing TR-069 should surely be enough, or if not, developed further to give them the extra features they do want.
In my experience, this is quite common in regard to Google fixing bugs in their products. I've added my voice to reported problems in Chrome, Android, Mail amongst others, but because they're not security related or service affecting, they seemingly get ignored. I can only presume Big G don't task their developers with fixing problems, only inventing new things. And lets face it, fixing exiting broken code isn't as fun as contributing a new widget.
Plus, Google products seem to experience entropy worse than many other - they start off really usable, fast and lightweight, and gradually erode into a big brown dysfunctional mass.
"No-one would have believed in the early years of the 21st century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of cyberspace. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of an interest in their lives by people off this planet. And yet, across the gulf of cyberspace, minds immeasurably more vacuous to ours regarded this data with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us…”
So presumably will get the money from the original Google deal, then win again from people picking up Verizon LTE services from this new Google deal? And also do some clever tax trickery to avoid paying tax.
N.b. are the Pixels locked to the network, or can you use another provider?
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