Posts by DanX

Microsoft: New icons, new drivers, AI! Everything is awesome!

So...

You are writing a letter levels of clever restored to the system?

Good enough IT really is good enough. You don't need new hardware

Cloud based desktops, sound amazing but...

Take a hosted Desktop environment, and gain massively from easy to manage and deploy applications. Data security and other benefits too.

Take this proposal to client at an SME, and try to explain those massive savings compared to the ongoing costs.

What happens though - is they still need a desktop to run in their office - and even the worst desktop, will manage 90%+ of everything they need to do.

Not an easy or obvious sell. What they have is good enough.

FBI Director defends iPhone 5C unlock tool that's obviously going to leak into wrong hands

I don't beleive them.

I think the FBI are just saying they have opened up the iPhone to mess with apple. I'm unconvinced that there will be much of use on it anyway.

May be I'm just very mistrustful?

At least this way the FBI can't hand out the secrets to enemies of the state by mistake right?

Work from home when the next big Windows 10 installation arrives

Will it run powerpoint?

I use my Xbox mainly for watching Youtube. To do this I have to update it a lot more often than I'd expect, and unless I do all the updates I can not go on line with it at all.

I already have to use my Windows account to log on to the thing mind... so that not really a change.

Met Police to slash hundreds of IT jobs, hands £216m outsourcing gig to Steria

Re: This won't be popular...

Diversity gives some resistance to centralised mistakes, and by talking to each other the forces can find what works best and implement that?

I expect if there was a centralised super IT team for all government departments it wouldn't save much, as the people with more responsibility would want more cash, and would be more irreplaceable. As it is with different forces there must be a market of people who do police IT work, and if you want to get rid of the chief IT fellow from the MET, then you have a pool of experience from the other bits.

I think consolidating this stuff and council stuff is a bad idea. Getting them to work smart and work together though - that seems like a brilliant plan.

Smartphones are ludicrously under-used, so steal their brains

This just doesn't work out right in my opinion.

Phones get dropped down the sink, broken, lost or stolen. The devices HAVE to work when you've not got your phone, and if you loose your phone you have to be able to repair it easily with all your devices.

This leads to your phone - just being an interface to the devices. Either home network control centres, that can be backed up, or putting your house control center in the cloud too. This is subject to internet outages (which do happen) so local computing power is still needed.

Full blown internet of things has to be very redundant to:

1) Security issues.

2) Local network failure

3) ISP failure.

4) User loss of device.

5) Device failure.

Sonos AXES support for Apple's iOS4 and 5

Re: Apologize at least

If your buying Sonos kit you have far too much spare cash anyway to be fair, but it is very annoying.

I just went out and bought a new iPad mini to replace my old ipad that won't work any more. In fairness the ipad kept crashing anyway when used for stuff that wasn't sonos controller, and the new ipad was far from free, but I don't think claiming that its terrible it costs more money is something that should shock sonos users. :(

Still very annoying.

If only they supported Windows 8 phone/RT I'd not care.

But my poor old ipad is now redundant.

Say goodbye to landfill Android: Top 10 cheap 'n' cheerful smartphones

As a long time iphone user.

I had to run some mailserver migration and wanted a test phone that wasn't mine for the testlab, I picked up a Moto E for the job cause it wasn't expensive, and its a really nice device.

Compared to my iPhone 4, its not as nice (more plastically), but it is a lot better. Do I like nice more than better...

Sonos Controller app update conflict

I am disapointed with the lack of Windows Native App support.

I have one Sonos play 3 speaker, and its pretty decent. I'd like more, but the software support isn't good enough.

I'm probably going to go to Windows Phone next (because its cheap and not android) but the lack of this app alone is making me consider getting a new iphone at some point. At which point I'll start saving up for some more Sonos things may be?

Adobe Creative Cloud 2014: Progress and pain in the usual places

I used to be a customer

I used to buy their stuff.

Started with Dreamweaver 3, then Fireworks and Dreamweaver 4 pack, then CS3 then CS4 and CS5.5 I'd upgrade every other upgrade cycle for a few hundred pounds.

Liked using their software for a few things I would do, and having access to Acrobat, Illustrator and the rest was really handy. Mainly do small levels of IT support - so being able to open a whole range of extra files to help my customers is handy.

Its not subscription, keep connected to the internet handy. I won't be subscribing. Still I still have the old 5.5 stuff which is generally pretty helpful still at the moment.

Measure for measure: We visit the most applied-physicist-rich building in the UK

Re: Gravity... value

Argh, or if an experiment is accepted to be the most accurate to they rework all the units so there is no error? My understanding of how constants and units are managed is not all good!

Re: Gravity... value

So they have defined the constant g as 9.8118177 m/s/s but how accurate is that figure for actual use? +- 0.00000005 m/s/s

Out of interest how much does gravity vary over the course of a typical day due to movements below the earths crust?

LOHAN preps Vulture 2 for hot vinyl wrap

How much does this wrap weigh?

I'm sure its fine and everything, but how much extra energy is the wrap going to cost the ship? Or will it have great features that will offset this?

The design looks great though btw.

Ex-Xbox gros fromage joins wireless speaker whizzkids Sonos

windows 8 app may be?

Sonos don't do windows 8 currently... so may be something will happen eventually now.

Clap Google, Amazon in irons to end tax shenanigans - MPs

Options:

These kind of things MIGHT work:

1) Introduce a Tobin Tax (a very small tax charged each time money is moved. Would get some back - but the city/government or someone in the UK really didn't like this idea.

2) Put up VAT

3) IE lower Corporate tax rates to incourage more companies to use the UK as a place worth taking tax.

Realistically though VAT probably can't go up much higher (23% MIGHT work...), and the tobin tax was disliked for a whole load of good reasons too. Lowering corporate rates is a race to the bottom though, because if the UK cuts, then Ireland will cut and then somewhere else will cut.

Its a mess. It won't be sorted in a hurry.

Google Nexus 7 shipping cock-up enrages fandroids

Got mine yesterday.

Very tight cover on the packaging - had to rip the slip cover off, and the speaker is apauling. Crackles badly at 50% volume. Other wise an amazing device.

Yell and Microsoft ink SMB deal

Yell, kind of sell websites to LOADS of small businesses.

They charge an outragous fortune for space in their directory, and offer to throw in a website for free too.

Nearly all small businesses I know of would be better off not bothering with Yell, and pooring the money into other Adverts (google adwords?) or just designing a decent website themselves and keeping the balance of the money.

But still people like being in the big yellow book for a few grand a year.

I guess they could also sell a bunch of Microsoft IT services too to this quite big market.

RIM opens its PlayBook – tablets clearly set for dominance

Pairing a good thing.

I nearly always use my iphone and my ipad together. If I'm working on something or webbrowsing, due to the lack of multi tasking, I tend to check my emails on the one, while leaving my book undisturbed on the other or what have you.

But working this way I've not needed multitasking to be honest, but I've also come to apprecate that having an extra screen avalible to show messages is a good thing. Now when out and about, if I could also use my 3G from my phone rather than requiring 2 phone connections thats a good thing.

I can also see it being great to be able to just use the screen as an extension of the smart phone. For example, keeping the music and video on just one of them. So when multitasking does finally hit the ipad, only having to keep one of the devices upto date with vast ammounts of data (over the cloud or via itunes or how ever) but being able to consume it on any device (airplay to apple TV may be) is a massive advantage.

Blackberry are doing great stuff. I hope it goes big wings and flys far.

Star Wars set for 3D rehash

Sand, I don't like Sand.

...Worst film? Surely not.

Lucas's love scenes from episode 2 and the wonderfully designed costumes that look only valugly OK when ripped lots... they win the crown for the next one.

Unless hordes of folk turn up for the first one, they will have nearly no one show for the 2nd.

India puts threatened BlackBerry ban on paper

...So....

What terroists need is BES. Its like Spectre is born, (requiring an IT department)

Hackers: 'ColdFusion bug more serious than Adobe says'

@Mark65 - I used to love it.

I used a bit of CF back in 2002 and before, I loved it.

The way that custom tags flow together and work was absolute magic. Its got a strong set of libaries and if I rember at all correctly, is highly scaleable.

The main reasons not to use it now for me, is its so much more expensive than ASP.net, and I love that even more. Still I think if you had alot of CF stuff set up, and had stumped up the licencing for it then it would make a great system.

Microsoft hits stubborn volume licensing site with more updates

I've managed to buy small quanties of VL no problems.

I've managed to buy small quanities of VL stuff with no partiacular problem.

Its just so damned expensive, with not enough margin on it...

Cable lays plan for graduate tax

Hang on...

Tax businesses that hire graduates...

Tax businesses to pay for education in general.

Tax high earning graduates.

Tax high earners?

Tax everyone?

2 peopled aged about 45, both working in IT, one with a Degree in Music the other with no degree, having instead worked in Macdonalds for 3 years. Both now do simalar work and earn £40,000, their degree doesn't help them.

Why should they have to contribue a greater ammount than the tax on a minimum wage job + their education costs to society? If I get that right the current costs for education and tax loss is less than £30,000 per student. Which over 40 years at 5% is.... £145 per month. Ouch.

Biz Linux needs Office license to run MS web apps

Outlook2010

Seems pretty OK. Upgraded no issue from 2007... Ribbon doesn't seem useless. Not sure where all the settings are yet!

...the convosations view is SO slow though. So very slow. And it doesn't seem to track convosations very well really...

Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language

For science!!! ?

I spent along time learning how to use Fortran 77 in the 90's for battling with data and modelling and the like for my undergraduate degree in physics. I've no idea why we used such an old version of the software (I suspected 2 reasons money, and the fact that Fortran 77 was pretty good) We were also taught C++, but never really shown how to use it.

May be this F# will break some ice in the world of science?

If its easier to write fast code, then its got to be a good thing? I'm no longer in the science world, but its always intresting to find out whats going on.

Microsoft's dual-screen booklet shows 'face' on web

Groove 2010 for e-pads...

This is basically a new Grove Mobile with better graphical interface, and better Onenote intergration.

I don't beleive it will exist for such a long time. The improvements they've been making in Groove have been very slow seeming to me. (its a cool product but I've yet to find an actual use for it - I keep looking) And one note - I don't even know if I have it installed. I tend to just use Word files for any research I need to do. Primative - but I'm much better at using word than onenote - and with out the pen interface I don't need its features.

Microsoft claims 90m sales of Windows 7

Buy 7, install XP.

Certainly I've been buying 7 pro with machines, and runing XP on the hardware.

1) It has less demands of the hardware.

2) Its fully compatible with existing software installed.

3) The user expereince is known and tested.

I wonder if Office 2010 will be compatibale with windows XP?

DARPA wants military iPhone and Android apps

Shocking.

And yet just last week, medical experts dissed the Iphone as being too shoddy for medical work.

What the iphone needs is a ruggedised, docking hotswappable battery/case device, that doesn't increase the size greatly. Then its medical and military purposes will only be limited by the relability of its systems. I can just see it now, Drone crashes due to incoming phone call...

iPods get digicam rumor upgrade

but...

My poor 3G phone... will not have video....

iPhone 3.0 - born on schedule...

Borked for ages on me.

Downloaded fine. But when it finished couldn't connect to Itunes for hours to finish the update process. Took about 3 hours all told to sort it self out. Very fustrating.

The error message, something like "Timed out while trying to connect to Itunes store - check your connection and try again." Strangley I could connect to Itunes and download other things.

I kind of feel like its a windows update. Sure its faster and better now, but what a pain getting it installed. Why do I have to reboot so many times...