Posts by Steve Davies 3

More Brits ditch Apple tablets for Amazon, Google, Samsung kit

Video, files and locked down

No different from my Kindle (HD) then....

especially the video. Even converting to MP4 is not always recognized by the device.

There are two sides to every story.

Or any other Android bit of kit

you know it makes sense!!!!!!

Well maybe. If you want a very disjointed environment then go ahead. AFAIK (and I'll accept being proven wrong) the Android ecosystem is just not as well integrated/connected as the Apple one.

I have a kindle. I use it for well, reading and that's it.

I had an Android (HTC) phone but I've gone back to a 'Dumb' Nokia so I can't really say for sure but a collegue of mine has given his wife his Galaxy and gone back to his iPhone simple because everything works better FOR HIM. A lot of fandroids seem to forget that not everyone wants to root their phone etc and the old, creaky IOS actually does work very well for an awful lot of people.

Paris because not everything 'shiny-shiny' is gold.

Apple branded porno-peddling perverts by Chinese Pravda

Dear 'The Register'

Can we have less of the 'Foxconn rebrander' when talking about Apple.

You know only too well that Foxconn makes kit for all sorts of other companies yet you don't use that somewhat derogatory term when mentioning those organisations.

Anyone would think you had stooped to the level of 'The National Enquirer'?

Eerie satnav boffinry claims it can predict THE FUTURE

Data mining

The Black box knows where you are, what car you drive and probably by the way you drive who is driving.

It matches your car to a free parking spot.

Bingo

All the local pubs/restaurants etc then know that another sap (sorry customer) is coming into the area and their systems will start the adverts as you drive towards said parking spot saying 'Eat at Joe's Sids down the road is a roach infested hovel' etc etc.

There really are no limits to how little privacy we have these days especially from the Ad-men

Yours, Grumpy-old git, and proud of it because no ad-man would dare target me for fear of getting a real dose of verbals back.

More opportunites for Data Mining

I'm sorry Dave, I can't allow you to stop at that <redacted> fast food outlet. Your blood cholesterol level today is far too high.

I'm sorry Dave I can't permit you to buy Booze. You have had your 1.5 units limit for the month.

Then there are the billboards along the highway giving you personalized adverts.

all this along with Audi drivers (esp White A5's & TT's) who drive like demented idiots, this is all more than enough to persuade me never to even contemplate buying an Audi in the future.

Hands up who wants 3D finger-controlled fridges? That's the spirit

May all these companies die a slow and horrible death

unless someone else drops one of these on them first...

Red Hat emulates Fedora Linux project with RDO OpenStack community

RDO = ?

Reality Distortion Override

Oh sorry, wrong company. Time for a beer (it is well time where I am at the moment)

Twitter buys music firm We Are Hunted, preps soundtrack for 200m twits

The Music Companies Wet Dream

Another way to get their crap songs onto a gazillion playlists. I'm willing to bet that the record companies will be setting up lots of PC's to stream nothing but their artists crap in the hope that this pushes them up the list of most popular.

Another way for the marketeers to control the drones (i.e. Twatter followers)

Thankfully none of the music I listen to would get anywhere near being popular these days.

<--- For the Record Labels

Windows 7 'security' patch knocks out PCs, knackers antivirus tools

Not the only problem with recent patches

One (not in this lot) has changed how Windows Explorer sees some of my USB Flash Drives.

If I take one drive and plug it into a USB3 port on my laptop the output is shown by file type rather that the 'details' list. If I want to see that I have to right click on the drive, select open as removable media etc.

If I take the same drive and plug it into a USB2 port on the same machine it shows the classic 'details' list.

WTF Microsoft?

Geolocation tech to save 60 Londoners from being run over next year

Guess what the answer will be?

(other than '42')

Ban the infernal combustion engine, ban wearing of headphones and the like so that can hear the leccy cars and get everyone onto 'Boris Bikes'

You know it makes sense!

Google asks Blighty to slave over its Maps for FREE

Plebs updating maps? Whatever next?

A six lane highway suddenly appearing right outside your least fav politicians/J Clarkson/etc country home?

I feel sure that some Students will have great fun with this during Rag Week.

you get my point.

Who is going to check the updates? Vested interests need not apply.

IBM Australia on the stand over $1bn blowout

SAP Project?

Cost Overrun?

Now there's a surprise (not)

<-- For SAP HQ

Microsoft squashes 9 bugs with Patch Tuesday fixes

IE 10

I tried it with the last round of updates.

No more. I had to remove it. more than 50% of the sites I went to just didn't work. One showed me just the frames. No text, buttons or anything else. Mega fail.

I don't want the Bing Desktop, Silverlight or IE10.

Yet hiding them does not stop then from being shown the next update time.

Microsoft really suck when it comes to updates. Don't even get me started on the reboots.

Kissinger and tell: WikiLeaks scrapes 1.7m US diplomatic reports from the '70s

Re: Old news

No one cares except for those who were on Capitol hill at the time.

....

Opps. There are a good number of them still there.

...

Cue calls for Assange to be tried for treason. Once a secret, always a secret. etc.

Review: HP ElitePad 900 Atom tablet

Re: Stylus !

and it is an optional extra to boot.

Some of us do have large plates of meat for hands. Lots of stuff made by Sony over the years has been useless in my hand simply because the buttons etc are too close together.

Touch U/I's are ok but for some of us, they are nowt more than a PITA (and finger, thumbs etc)

Speaking in Tech: Forget BYOD, now there's Bring Your Own CODE

Why?

Quote

individual programmers crafting their own code and running it on someone else's public cloud

Why would I trust this mythical 'someone else' with my Intellectual Property without a whole shed load of legalese behind it.

This 'someone else' is pretty free to pilfer my code and use it to the benefit of their own business. If I recall there have been a few cases where Amazon cloud users have suddenly seen Amazon come out with a service that looks remarkably like their own and usually at a lower price.

Answers on a pin head in copper plate handwriting please.

How the iPad ruined the lives of IT architects

Re: re: boots

Didn't you have the block inside the oven?

Same on you. That's how you change the main bearings on most old British bikes.

My ex used to moan like mad when i used her 'spotless' oven for main bearing changing. Sadly my 1969 Trident Crankcase won't fit in my current oven.

Oxymoron?

Quote

Gavin Payne is a Microsoft Certified Architect who scopes, designs, implements and migrates mission critical data platforms

Tux naturally

Just what is Oracle going to plop out as its golden storage egg?

Oracle's Plan 'B'

Must be Exadata.

They seem to be pushing this as a solution to getting rid of a number of Unix boxes.

Facebook buys Dummly from outernet prodigy Dick D'Miner

But do 'Androids really dream of Electric Sheep?'

Probably not when the only 'sheep' references here relate to Apple users but we really deserve to know

Public cloud will grow when experienced IT folks DIE

Who's data is it then?

As an IT Grumpy Old Man I have deep reservations about using Cloud Hosting services.

If you use a company that even has a presence in the US your data is there for the Feds to snoop. You won't know about the court order graned by some drunken judge in Hicksvile Nebraska but they can get access to everything you put in the cloud.

Even German Privacy Laws can't help you here.

All it takes is one Fed who has a friend/brother who works for a rival and your company is probably down the tubes and you would never know why.

The Feds openely declared aim to snoop on computers everywhere should be taken as a direct threat.

Don't put your stuff in a public cloud.

Don't let 'others' have access to your data.

etc

etc

etc

Sigh, the modern generation don't give a damm about this. They just think it is cool to have everything hived off into the cloud.

Black Helicopter naturally.

I am NOT a PC repair man. I will NOT get your iPad working

I don't do Windows.

That's what I say when I'm asked about supporting/fixing a PC. Quite simple really.

Two cases. both used windows and they called me at least once a year to 'fix their computer'.

I converted both to using Mac's and I've not had any calls since. Both families are happy with their systems and will probably carry on using them for a long time.

Blighty's revolutionary Cold War teashop computer - and Nigella Lawson

Re: Astounding

In those days, the bean counters did as they were told and added numbers on their counting frames especially in a company with strong leaders who wouldn't think twice about handing you (the bean counter) their P.45 if you made too much noise drinking your Lyon coffee.

my Mother met my Father in Lyons Corner house.

Re: Er...

Or Wireless World Perhaps? Lots of Triode and Pentode circuits in them (of a certain age)

(a long deceased relative of mine was some manager or other at Pinnacle Electronics)

Not got 4G? There's a reason we aren't called 'Four', sniffs Three

Re: 4G - what is the point...

You aren't doing things like

- Looking at the latest Celeb making an utter fool of themselves on social media

- Downloading the latest blockbluster from netflix/lovefilm/etc and viewing it on a stupidly small screen

- Part of the generation that needs to be on-line all the time to get their latest fix of social media.

(seeing all the withdrawal symptoms on a flight LFR->LAX recently makes me believe that a whole generation of young people are totally addicted to instant communication/gratification. The OMG, no one has liked me in what 20 minutes, I'm a complete failure.)

etc, etc ,etc

Frankly if you can't be without this sort of stuff then you should be taken to an island in the middle of nowhere and left there without a mobile phone/tablet/pc until you are cured.

mines the one with a nokia 6130 in the pocket.

Microsoft LOVES YOU: Free Wi-Fi on the British railways for a month

Re: Office 365 vs British Railways

On the anniversary of the release of the Beeching Report back in 1963 I suppose it is fitting to compare the two.

BR as many of us knew it is long dead and buried. If you can remember back to the days of 'This is the Age of the Train' what we have now is a far better railway mostly free of interference from H.M Treasury.

If you can remember how BR cooked the books in order to make the Electrification of the East Coast Main Line fit the Treasury accounting model then you will know what I mean. You can compare H.M Treasury and how the Add up numbers as being akin to the way Hollywood does it so that mega blockbusters always make a hefty financial loss.

We have growing numbers of passengers year on year.

MS on the other hand is desperate to get people to buy into its subscription model. I suppose it is like buying a season ticket on the railways. At least if your train does not turn up (within the conditions in the small print) you can get your money back. Office 365 is available if you can get a decent 3g signal. That is it's biggest problem. You can't.

I live 40 miles from London in a pretty urbanised area. There are plenty of 3g blackspots around where I live. you would be luck to get a 2g signal in one place a couple of miles from where I live. The Reading Guildford line has many dead zones around Crowthorne.

Frankly, MS would be better off making sure that their suckers (sorry, subscribers) can get a decent signal than messing around with this gimmick.

I won't be using office 365 simply because their business model does not work for me.

Coat naturally

Mines the one with a copy of the 1966 Ian Allan Combined Guide with ALL Diesels neatly underlined and can be seen standing on the end of the platform at Clapham Jcn waiting for a West Country to haul the Bournemouth Belle.

Ellison aims his first Oracle 'mainframe' at Big Blue

And just how much is the Oracle RDBMS going to cost?

when it is a per core license?

Save heaps on the H/W cost, spent it all (and a lot more probably) on software

Next from Microsoft: 'Blue', the Windows 8 they hope you don't hate

Reminds me of

Some old Pink Floyd Lyrics

Astromie Dommie

Lime and limpid green, a second scene

A fight between the blue you once knew.

Floating down, the sound surrounds

Around the icy waters underground.

Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.

Neptune, Titan, Stars can frighten.

Lime and limpid green, a second scene

A fight between the blue you once knew.

Floating down, the sound surrounds

Around the icy waters underground.

Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.

Neptune, Titan, Stars can frighten.

Blinding signs flap,

Flicker, flicker, flicker blam. Pow, pow.

Stairway scare, Dan Dare, who's there?

Lime and limpid green, the sounds around

The icy waters under

Lime and limpid green, the sounds around

The icy waters underground.

especially this line

A fight between the blue you once knew.

Syd at his best.

Apple share-price-off-a-cliff: Told you that would happen

Don't blame Apple for the price drop

Blame those short termist Analysists who gaze into crystal balls and predict a companies earnings for the next quarter.

From my experience they always go on the high side. So when a company comes in with results less than 1% lower than their predictions the share price tanks.

Come in 1% over and the share price still drops because the market has already taken the predicted results into consideration.

There is no fundamental difference between the above and any of those on-line gambing sites that are so heavily advertised on TV these days (but why are they targetting women so much? Are men not as foolish with their money?)

Apple pulls iForgot password recovery system over security bug

The other problem with Android

is that manufacturers are really loathe to release security updates for anything but their latest 'shiny-shiny' toy.

Samsung are still selling phones with Android 2.3 installed. Are there any security updates? Are there heck.

Until the manufacturers take updates more seriously then I will keep using my Nokia 6310.

I guess that this is the price of having no walled garden. Sometimes it seems that the Apple way isn't far wrong. Now I'll get downvoted into oblivion for saying that but before you do please consider what I'm trying to say. Android device makers are really reluctant to release security updates to phones that are not currently being sold with their latest version of Android installed.

Ubuntu tapped by China for national operating system

How long before the 'backdoors' start appearing?

in Ubuntu code shipped to the West?

What ever happened to 'Red Flag' Linux then?

Perhaps the Chinese Gov are trying this route to get hold of all our data in the hope that we won't notice?

Fail for obvious reasons including the mandatory 'I told you so' when it all goes horribly wrong and Canonical gets taken over by the Chinese Gov (or Foxconn)

Boffin road trip! The Reg presents Geek's Guide to Britain

Re: Steamy.

Remember that the Crofton Beam Engine was secondhand when it was installed at Crofton. It had been used in a Cornish mine before that.

Well worth the visit especially is there is a Steam special going down the 'Hants & Berks' line that runs close to the Canal.

Then there is the Arkwright Mills in Derbyshire, Leadhills (public library) Scotland

And naturally Ironbridge/Coalbrookdale where the true industrial revolution began (IMHO)

Coat with a copy of my 'guide to the industrial archaeology of the UK' in the pocket

Adastral Park*, Arrr the memories.

Did a lot of biz there in my days with DEC *When it was called Martlesham

I never stayed at the Suffolk Punch though. I preferred to carry on up the A12 and enjoy a pint of Adnams and some great food in Southwold.

Pint Naturally

Young model ruthlessly fingers upskirt iPad petshop pervert

That reminds me to delete my LinkedIn Profile

Oh silly, I don't have one

Coat, with nothing on underneath like all old time flashers. Better than that excuse for a flash they put on most devices these days

(only joking)

Review: HTC One

Re: Potato instead of camera module

If you really want a decent camera then get a camera.

However, the next Samsung brick sized phone is rumored to have a Nikon Camera inside

http://nikonrumors.com/2013/03/18/rumor-next-nexus-5-phone-to-have-a-nikon-camera.aspx/

Mines the one with D800 + 200-400 zoom slung over the shoulder.

Virgin Media boss to Osbo: Bung city fibre cash into small biz

Usual VM pisstake

1) Any SME who needs a website is probably already online

2) How many of them need even 10Mbits connection when most (if not all have their website hosted elsewhere)

3) Most SME's (unless they are the local Pizza/Indian/Chinese/Chippy) don't need to be connect all the time during business hours. They have other things to do like running their business don't you know.

Then there is the current VM network. Where I live I can get Sky* (are you joking), VM, BT or a number of LLU providers. Most of my neighbours are on on VM or their Wireless SSD would have me think so.

In the evening their (porn) downloading slows down to a crawl. LAst time I did a speedtest for one friend they were getting 512Kb. I have FTTC and get 60Mbits to my Modem. There are exactly 5 of us sharing a nice load of fibre. At the moment there is more than enough to go round so the we have one each. Yet VM bombard me with 2-3 mailings a week extolling the virtue of their 'superfast' network. I'd really like to get the Bearded on to visit my local and see how crap their network really is.

*(If I changed to Sky, they can't support FTTC hence my comment)

The people who live in the other half of my Semi use my network in the evenings simply because everyone else in the street is using the VM network to its max and frankly it is pathetic.

They really do need to get their act together and sort out their existing infrastructure.

Sysadmins: Let's perch on Microsoft Santa's lap, show him our wish list

And the reaction in MS Towers is?...?

nah-nah-nah-nah-nah can't hear you.

Being serious for a moment.

MS are clearly trying to keep their revenue/gross margins up. With the lack of people buying into the Windows 8 nightmare they are seeing their daily takings dropping. So they are raising the prices of just about everything else in their price book.

Whilst this may have a short term $$$ value I am sure that many such as the Author will be looking for lower cost alternatives

IMHO, MS are in a downward spiral and these moves seem to be nearly the last throws of their dice in the Enterprise Game.

My Employers are firmly wedded to the MS Mantra with whole swathes of software written in .Net. Thankfully some of us have been preaching platform independence for some time. The ironic thing is that it is IBM who are key suppliers to us in many areas because of the ability to run things like MQSeries on a wide range of Hardware.

4K video may wow vidiots, but content creators see pitfalls

Re: Back-of-napking calculations

I use a ND Filter on my D800 quite a bit. It is most certainly not to get those dreamy water effects.

I use it mainly to reduce the DOF when shooting in bright sunlight.

Microsoft issues manual on Brits to Cambridge exports

Re: you can keep the 'Have a Nice Day' meaningless words

Having worked in Cambridge UK and Cambridge MA I can tell you that the UK version is a lot more bawdy than the US Impersonator.

Now if the Yanks went up to Norfolk, they would feel quite at home. There is a lot of strange folk in them their flatlands.

(My mother was born in E Dereham and grew up in Ely).

Pint, Adnams Broadside naturally.

Flooding market with cheap antivirus kit isn't going to help ANYONE

Re: Try this solution ...

Errr? How exactly does your solution stop something getting loaded into RAM and stealing all sorts of nasty/sensitive stuff from the running system including the H/W write protected flash drives?

The only solution as I see it is not NOT put anything on an Internet connected device that you wouldn't mind getting stolen and even made public.

Then even if the AV etc fails there is not much of any use that can get stolen.

Does make things like internet shopping/banking/life a bit difficult though.

To overcome that you have to get into what you might be hinting at with your second link. Boot up a clean system, login to your fav internet site, do some business and then shut everything down. Rinse and repeat always using a clean system to work with. No saved passwords or account details allowed either.

Now how user friendly is that? Not very much but hey, security is everything isn't it?

Britain's passport and ID service seeks facial recog tech suppliers

If the current scanners at Heathrow are anything to go by

they fail miserably if I haven't shaved in a few days. I've given up trying to use them.

These new ones will have to be able to differentiate between identical twins. That in itself is not easy.

I see another good intention on the part of the Government failing miserably. At least 16M squid is nowhere near the billions squandered on IT projects in any year.

The budget should also limit the range of possible scope creep but I wouldn't put it past the un-civil service to gold plate everything in sight.

Samsung's new Galaxy S 4: iPhone assassin or Android also-ran?

What is so compelling?

As far as I can see this is just another Android Phone. Meh! There is nothing here that says 'buy me' that is not in pretty well every other phone (android/iPhone or windows phone) available today.

Sure it has a lot of sensors and there is some nifty electronics inside but what level of improvement of user experience will this give me over a dozen other phones out there?

At the moment, I can't see anything.

Then there is Rik's statement about the iPhone 5 being last weeks newspaper.

I have to ask, 'so what?'. Does it do what it says on the tin?

In the broader consumer world (not the technophobes who post on 'El Reg') does this really matter?

In the majority of cases, I think that is does not.

Therefore I must conclude that this is a sign of the smart phone market maturing to point where all the phones will do pretty well everything that the users are demanding. Like new versions of MS Office, the new features are only useful to a small percentage of the overall user base.

So no compelling need to rush out and buy one of the then?

Six things a text editor must do - or it's a one-way trip to the trash

Teco

Now that was a lovely editor. Even edited binary files. Came from the DEC-10. I used it on a PDP-11 for years.

As Teco seems to have died a death then I'll settle for UltraEdit. I've been using it for years and have my own license for it. Notepad++ just does not hack it when it comes to XML files. (lack of pretty formatting switch)

O2 flogs new GPS mobile-based telecare to sick and elderly

Re: Learning To Walk Before You Run

There are plenty of other services like this that don't need a mobile signal to work. They use that quaint old thing called a 'land line'. my 91yr old mother has one of these. Mobile tech is simply beyond her.

She lives well outside the M25 ring and in an area where mobile coverage is a bit iffy at the best of times.

So most of your statement is spot on, the article does miss out that there are alternatives to the O2 solution that have been running for years.

MWC 2013: The Chinese are coming - and you ain't seen nothing yet

Re: Price Ideas?

Not everyone wants a 5in brick as their phone you know.

Even my old (and now disused) HTC Sensation was too big for me and I have hands the size of dinner plates.

No one USP will satisfy ALL of the market. What might be essential for one person is a big 'no-no' for another.

NFC and 5in screens are big turn offs for me but there again, I'm a grumpy old man and not a hip young thing that needs to be seen with the latest 'shiny shiny' toy.

Cheap iPhone mini 'makes sense' for world domination

Re: NO! It doesn't make sense. It would ruin Apple!

you might not have a lot of street cred but at least the iThieves in places like NYC will leave you alone.

coat, not one from a 'chav' supplier.

Bill Gates: 'Microsoft didn't MISS cell phone' bandwagon

APT ? I thought I'd just been transported back to the 1980's

Back then APT meant (for a few gricers anyway), Advanced Passenger Train.

Coat, gone down the pub even though it is early, it is the last friday of the month.

I used to be an Oracle DBA ... but now I'm a Big Data guru

Cue Job postings asking for...

10 years experience with 'Big Data'

then anyone who has even smelt Oracle or DB2 out in the wild will apply.

Only those assimilated by the Borg will mention SQLServer.

Ubuntu? Fedora? Mint? Debian? We'll find you the right Linux to swallow

CentOS for me

It does everything I want from a Linux Distro. Still with Gnome 2 as its primary GUI.

Tux Naturally.

Apple design bloke Ive finally honoured properly - with Blue Peter badge

Oblig - Here's one I prepared earlier

When I grew up you were either in the BP camp or in the ITV upstart called Magpie.

The days of John Noakes and Shep are fond memories of watching BP in my childhood.

Some of the things they made probably contributed to my eventually becoming a CEng.