Posts by 0laf 1980 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Nov 2009
They'll have panicked at the though of proper pen testing actually costing money and or the worrying prospect it might find something which would then need to be fixed.
Far better to get the developer to run an out of date, unlicensed copy of Nessus at it for 10min.
These little tablets are quite zippy but I'm not sure how they would do for any serious multitasking. You can pick up an outlet Dell Venue 11 tablet with an i5 intel processor and 4Gb Ram for £300 or a bit less for an i3. You're into genuine laptop rivals there and they should be able to handle just about anything short of gaming.
They have bit of a bad rep if you look up the reviews but a BIOS update deals with most of those issues. We have a large number of these at work and they work well and are popular with the users. Probably double the weight of the Linx tablet if that's an issue.
I know a few people with these now, mainly the 10" version. For the most part they are happy with the devices using them as low powered laptops. The OS install and only 32Gb of on board storage doesn't give much remaining space so an SDCard is really a necessity.
Most people comment that the screen isn't glorious and the build quality isn't wonderful and the location of the physical buttons is a bit odd but overall more than decent for the price point.
Linx have a cash back offer of £30 on the 7/8 and £50 on the 10". It's not straightforward and depends on you buying from the right shop and trading in a decent 7" tablet. they won't accept any junk Ebay tablet. So it's debatable whether you would want to give up a decent tablet for £50.
Staples also did these at a give away price before Xmas. I missed out on a £89 10" which would have been a bargain.
Like all platforms it works best when you stay within the ecosystem. So Outlook works well with Outlook.com, One drive works well with Windows. When you cross ecosystems that's when things tend to get tricky but I guess they are all built to do that.
The versions of windows that people get as close to loving as I think is going to happen were the OSs that just worked, quietly got on with their job and let people do things on the computer that they wanted. I'm thinking Win 2000, XP and 7.
If they get back to that then Win10 will be popular.
Win8 wasn't bad, it was just touch focussed and therefore shit without touch. It was fast and secure, it they'd sorted the interface it would have done fine.
Hear Hear!
and a posthumous pint to the Prof.
It would be wonderful if one of the orbiters could send a signal to give the thing a nudge or get some data from a low gain antenna (or summit like that) but that's more Hollywood than science probably.
The PITA with Amazon is they they don't offer their service on any other mobile platform other than their own Kindles. Cheap full Windows tablets will help there or you have to jump ship to Netflix. I still like getting physical disks through the Lovefim part of Amazon so I've stuck with them so far. The lack of Android and other support is grating though.
1st line support here is basically filled with non-techies now so there is no triage of the stupid calls no ability to fix silly little thing and no ability to translate the problem into something meaningful for the workers with knowledge.
That seems to be the trend now since no-one is ever laid off they just go on redeployment and end up on the helldesk.
Desktop techies aren't much better tbh. "Check it works before you leave" seems to be a bit of an alien concept
I have a mate that used to do IT on superyachts. He had many similar stories.
I used to be the "IT guy" in a school where basically if it plugs in the wall and doesn't make food it's a computer problem.
I've had teacher yelling at me down the phone to make their printer work because it was
"urgent" (everything with teachers is urgent) and unacceptable that it wasn't working - printer was out of paper.
Internet access had been off all day - she'd unplugged the modem to plug in a phone (it was a while ago) and forgot to switch them back.
Recording "PC" wouldn't start up for an experiment - It was a 25yr old BBC Micro that had finally died.
I'm sure there were many others but it becomes the norm after a while and your brain screens it out as noise.
That's the story with most warmed over 'ordinary' cars. They're big and heavy so despite the big hp figures there really isn't much nimbleness or urge about them. They make 100mph feel like 50.
Sticking on fat low profiles and rock hard suspension might make the car look nice but it can make them a miserable place to be on the crap roads we have now.
The ads make out you'll be driving a Caterham when the reality is closer to a Iveco.
But then most drivers only like the fantasy of driving properly, they don't really want a car that might bite them if they get it wrong.
Because Baroness Whats-her-pus and any other involved minister are determined that THEIR project will be finished so they don't get hung out to dry with another incomplete project story in the press.
you can add the same mentality to numerous other projects that make little sense but have a minister driving them forward whatever the cost or objection, G-Cloud, HS2, Millennium Dome, education changes, NHS IT,....
Same things happen in the US and probably every other country
MS is starting to get some significant interest in the cheap tablet market too. Lots of cheap devices coming out with the free Win8.1 OS on them and in general they seem to be better received than cheap android tablets.
Windows phones also getting looked at seriously within the public sector because they can be tied into and managed by existing infrastructure.
MS also starting to flex some muscles on the privacy field with the challenged to the US courts over access to overseas data. No one trusts Google any more and no one ever trusted Apple MS seeing an opening there by playing nice.
I can't imaging MS ever challenging Apple for the £$£ high end shiny phone market but I think they're going to do ok from businesses, government and people that like things that just work.
People that work are also looking at Blackberry again as well.
There was also some little cold gas thruster to try to keep it on the rock but it was known to have failed before it even detached. Then unfortunately the harpoons failed too. the gravity is so weak that it bounced about 1km up and it took a couple of hours to come back down again and in that time the comet turned about 1km under it.
Interesting that they are now in the almost 'F**k and try" stage where anything goes as long as there is power left. Plus there is an outside bet it could wake up in the future as it gets closer to the sun.
A shame it didn't work perfectly but an awesome bit of work none the less.
Blackberry's niche was hardcore government and big business security. BB products had (have?) security baked in from the hardware up and they were receptive to the suggestions of Government agencies such as GCHQ and NIST.
For that reason for a long time Blackberry products were the only ones signed off for use within high assurance organisations.
But BB sat on it's hands for so long that Government users began to hate their BB and crave the fondling delights of iOS. BB then decided to make a jump for the wider public and try to sell to the yoof market that worked for while until they got bored of the BB offerings too. So they ended up pissing off their old market and losing their grasp on the new.
Meanwhile other companies started to sniff the pork from Government and began to make their products more enterprise orientated except Apple who allegedly told the security services to take a hike 'coz we're Apple'.
It seems now that BB has realised that they've made an arse of their dalliance into the feral over supplied public mobile market and they're starting to court their old customers again.
I suspect if they can get it right then they may pick up some of their old customers that still like physical keyboards and proper security. However new boys like Samsung are getting signed off for high assurance work as well so the future is less than certain. Plus executives are as prone to the whims of fashion as anyone else, BB ain't fashionable so the Passport better be a phenomenally useful tool or it'll just get ignored.
Myself a few years ago I'd have bet a small amount on MS buying up BB's security patents when they went bust. I still think that might happen yet. If the Chinese buy BB expect the Government accreditation to be dropped like a red hot turd.
I like my winpho (Lumia 920) but I do seem to be part of a small population.
I've found the OS rock solid, the only thing that ever crashes the phone is the Nokia music app and that's pretty rare.
I'm not an app junky so the smaller number of apps doesn't bother me, although the store has improved a lot since 8.1 came out.
Not sure I'd pay £300 for the reviewed phone though. The reason I like my winpho so much is that it was a bargain.
I used to get 35-40mpg from a 2.0 Turbo petrol (197hp) Skoda Octavia on a mixed driving route. The EU lab combined average was 35.7mpg. Seems to be that the more eco the car the further away form reality the lab results are.
I know plenty of people with "gas guzzlers" paying higher VED rates that get better mpg than others with eco cars.
If nothing else it shows what a nonsense the current EU testing is.
I've only read Red Mars and I found it a bit dull to be honest. A lot of the science was interesting but the characters themselves were uninteresting for the most part.
The Martian by Andy Weir is out as a film next year. The science in it is pretty hard but it was a lot more entertaining than Red Mars.
It's....odd. I suspect you can only really judge this one by using it for a while and a 5 minute fondle in a shop won't do that.
I'm also not very sure this will work. Sometimes how well a product works just doesn't matter. If your board members think that they will get sniggered at by their peers when they whip a BB Passport out then they won't take it, they'll stick with the shiny.
The productive people in the middle that might benefit from the productivity features and probably don't care as much about what device they use may not get the option.
Also there is still a big question over the costs of running the BB12 back end to manage these. devices. It's a big ask to overhaul everything to stick with a company that may or may not be around in 2yr. Might be easier to overhaul everything and go device agnostic allowing all mobile device types to be used.
I think things are better than there were but that's all come from the guys working in the trenches forming their own inter-agency networks. Not from this MP led pork barrel.
Cabinet Office still expects the work to be done by everyone else while they stamp their name on the end product and take the credit.
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