Posts by Tim 11

Gartner: Stop worrying and love the cloud, with all its outages and lock-in

Re: I'm probably my own worst enemy but ...

I've got sympathy for your views - I think cloud definitely has many advantages in some situations but IMO lock-in is on rather a different scale

If you've built your app as on-premise .NET say, you may be locked into Microsoft but you're not locked in to a server or hosting vendor, and assuming your servers are virtualized you have lots of options for deploying them, in the cloud or on-prem, without changing a single line of code. However if you've built it on AWS and want to move to azure, you're looking at a significant rewrite

The first real robot war is coming: Machine versus lawyer

Re: LLM. All your works belong to us.

And when you see the words "The Guardian" and "Naomi Klein" in the same sentence you know what you're get is going to be a completely balanced and objective review of the situation

Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows code in memory-safe Rust

This doesn't mean you should convert your app to rust

There's (rightly) a lot of hype at the moment about rust and lots of people rushing to learn and use it, but don't forget rust is not an application development language; it's just a memory-safe alternative to C or Assembler for use when building operating systems and ultra-high-performance code.

If you want to build web sites or mobile apps you're well serviced by some great languages nowadays, but don't be dragged into the rust bandwagon.

BOFH: We send a user to visit Kelvin – Keeper of the Batteries

Re: Keepers of...

Normally I would consider myself a very rational and mathematically-minded person but I must admit that if the weather forecast says 5% chance of rain and I get rained on, boy am I pissed, even if it only happens one time in 20

Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry

up to two times faster performance while using 50 percent less memory

That's a start - let me know when you've doubled the speed and halved the memory footprint another 3 times and it might be usable

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

only used online delivery once (when both me and the missus had COVID and had to isolate). about £75 worth of stuff from morrisons and not a single substitution (though it was mostly basic groceries). my only complaint would be the number of carrier bags used (and charged 10p each) - it was about 12 when I probably would have crammed it into 4

Botched migration resulted in a great deal: One for the price of two

I've been a beneficiary of a similar process. I got made redundant when my company was acquired in 2001 and the new owners said I could keep my old Nokia 6310. However in spite of my frequent requests they didn't cancel the contract for another 18 months so I had it for free.

Still, since they managed to piss $500m of investors money up the wall by failing to deliver anything before they eventually went bust, I guess a few hundred quid was a drop in the ocean

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Re: The whole premise of this article is bullshit

Cloud often works well at the small end of the scale as well. I have a few bespoke light-use web apps and web services hosted for customers on azure which cost from about 15 bucks a month for a web service, maybe rising to 50 bucks if you need RDB as well.

Google: You get crypto, you get crypto, almost everyone gets email crypto!

"The service encrypts emails and meeting events in the client's browser before they reach Google Cloud servers"

isn't that HTTPS ?

Save $7 million on cloud by spending $600k on servers, says 37Signals' David Heinemeier Hansson

Re: Clouds clearing

I work for a small company that hosts our web app on AWS - we spend a couple of hundred bucks a month on lambda, SQL, S3. we don't need a server room or servers; we don't need to worry about downtime or scheduled maintenance, and we know we could scale to 10x overnight if we needed to

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

Re: Pot, kettle...

surely edge is THEIR browser that THEY code so they should be able to do what the hell they like with it?

"with the added trust of Microsoft"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Microsoft's .NET Framework gets one less update reboot

.Net Framework is not .Net

It's worth pointing out for any of your readers that don't use this technology on a day-to-day basis that .Net Framework (to which this article refers) is the framework originally introduced around the turn of the century which is now at version 4.8. This has been in legacy/maintenance mode for a few years and is now considered to the part of the operating system for support purposes, much like VB6 runtime or Visual C++ runtime libraries.

For the past 5 years, Microsoft's efforts have been focused on the open-source cross-platform framework previously called .Net Core and now called just .Net (without the word "framework" or "core")

Google's $100b bad day demo may be worth the price

Re: Censorship from Google?

Hmm, I'd never heard of Alex Berenson but in google the top result is this which is a piece of fake news.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/02/08/investigative_issues_dr_fauci_now_admits_the_mrna_covid_vaccines_hardly_work_and_might_not_be_approvable_880586.html

Microsoft switches Edge’s PDF reader to pay-to-play Adobe Acrobat

Re: firefox & pdf24

exactly

a few years ago (maybe 10) everybody had to use acrobat to read PDFs because there was no alternative.

then the Firefox folk realised that 99% of people jut want to look at their bank statement or theatre ticket with the minimum of fuss and they could build something in JS that could do that directly in the browser. Those 99% of people stopped using Acrobat because they had no need

now Microsoft and Adobe have "realised" that those people definitely can't live without Acrobat for some reason (presumably for the same reason they definitely can't live without Edge).

Shag pile PC earned techies a carpeting from HR

Re: Spoof

A colleague left his PC unlocked so I quickly went onto amazon and tried to buy a big box of fish food.

I couldn't put the order through because it wanted re-confirmation of password, but he did say that he kept getting fish food adverts for months afterwards.

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

Article Incorrectly categorised

This was filled under BOFH - should have been on-call!

Microsoft chases Google with ChatGPT-powered Bing

Bing's paltry three percent

Was anyone else quite surprised to see that bing's market share is so low? After all, 75% of desktops are Windows and for someone who's not a techie, it's actually quite difficult to (a) make edge use anything other than bing or (b) stop edge re-asserting itself as the default browser

OneDrive back on its feet, but ongoing Skype credit problem hasn't gone away

Re: "international roaming is a lot more affordable"

yup - the only time I use skype now is to make outgoing international calls to actual phone numbers - AFAIK there's no way to do that with WhatsApp, Facebook, teams etc.

$20m SAP ECC replacement project delayed because UK university unsure what it wants

As Einstein said

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.”

Stack Overflow bans ChatGPT as 'substantially harmful' for coding issues

It depends how often it provides wrong answers compared to the occurrence of correct answers. Wikipedia contains (probably) tens of thousands of factual inaccuracies but also contains orders of magnitude more correct facts than any other encyclopedia.

I am not defending ChatGPT but I will defend SO in general (though often not it's mods)

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

"Properly resilient"

I don't think you could really regard a system as "properly resilient" if both sets of equipment are plugged into the same mains socket

.NET open source is 'heavily under-funded' says AWS

It's friday, stop being so f**ing negative everyone

Yes, both Microsoft and Amazon are commercial organizations and want to make money my luring customers away from their competitors, and capitalism is evil yadda yadda

But isn't it amazing that we're seeing the open sourcing and portatibility of a great framework like .Net, all available to developers for free, instead of competitors trying to sabbotage each other in the marketplace like we had with IE, Java, and numerous others. As someone who's been programming since the early 80's I think it's fair to say "you never had it so good"

I work daily with .Net, Java, Node, Python, on Azure, AWS, Windows, Linux in many different combinations, and sometimes I have to stop and pinch myself at how much free software and amazing interoperability we get nowadays.

CT scanning tech could put an end to 100ml liquid limit on flights by 2024

I don't understand

The point of the regulations, as I understand them is that we're not allowed more than 10x100ml of liquids on a plane because someone could make a bomb out of liquids if they got hold of more than that (let's ignore for the minute that it's also possible, some might say easier, to make a bomb of solids)

how does a CT scanner change that? surely it can't detect the exact chemicals present in a liquid

Big brands urged to pause Twitter ads until Elon's learned how this all works

There's an implicit but very strong assumption in the article that what's good for advertisers is by definition good for society.

Your next PC should be a desktop – maybe even this Chinese mini machine

Sorry - laptop all the way for me

I guess it depends on your lifestyle but the idea that I can only ever use my computer in one room in one building is too limiting for me. Assuming I need a laptop anyway just in case, why bother keeping 2 machines synced up-to-date with everything I need?

And I'm afraid to say that 2-monitor setups are consigned to history now that you can buy a 30 inch 4k monitor for a few hundred quid. if you've got one monitor that fills your field of view, a second one is actually an encumbrance.

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Re: Talking points

Indeed, I find that the attitude I've always taken towards race (i.e. ignoring it) is becoming increasingly marginalized

Microsoft ships non-Surface PC: a cheap Arm box for devs

Re: Windows RT 2?

The problem with RT was that it couldn't run "legacy" apps - i.e. every single app in the universe not written for RT.

Apparently the new version can simulate the intel architecture - time will tell whether that proves to be just a pipe dream

Oracle's Larry Ellison shares fears of bankrupting Western civilization with healthcare

$10B for a unified electronic records database

Give me an afternoon with React and DynamoDB and I reckon I could get it going for, let's say 1/2 million?

Lenovo reveals rollable laptop and smartphone screens

I would definitely be tempted by a flip phone if it were reliable and at a price I would be willing to pay (which is way less than the current cost). for me the killer feature is that it takes up only 1/2 as much space in your pocket but I would also imagine they are (or could be made) more resilient to damage because the screen is not exposes when it's folded

Microsoft leaves the Office, rebrands everything as 365

Re: The Microsoft Department of Renaming Things

It's not just frippery either - it's a significant frustration in working with MS products. searching for information is really difficult when products are being renamed all the time, especially when multiple unrelated products moved under the same brand e.g. skype (business vs home), PowerApps (canvas vs model-driven)

Microsoft debuts Windows 11 2022 Update – now with features added monthly

Re: Eh? Most productive?

That should read "most productive (within the scope of Windows 11)" - it goes without saying that not using Windows 11 may be more productive (and when I say "may" I'm being kind to MS because I haven't used it myself)

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

"Given a choice between security and having applications work as expected, Microsoft often chooses the insecure status quo"

I suspect a lot of businesses (at least those where the IT department exists primarily to provide a service to its users), would feel that having applications work as expected is a fairly high priority. After all, there's plenty of things you can do to mitigate against security problems, but without apps that work, your business is dead in the water.

One of the reasons Windows is popular is because it gave developers the ability to hack together these department-level apps using access and word macros and the like. Trying to solve the problem by cutting it off is like saying "cars driving fast are dangerous, let's limit them to walking pace"

FYI I hate Windows and use Linux for my day-to-day, but wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't an experienced IT geek.

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

only 4% efficient ?

how many suns would we need to meet the global need?

One way Bitcoin miners can make money: Selling electricity back to Texas

Re: Nice power grid you got 'ere, Guv

if you hadn't put the word "gazpacho" in, that would have passed muster amongst most of the world's financial experts

Global PC market falls at fastest rate in 9 years

And don't forget, everyone has just bought a new PC so they could work from home during the lockdown

Europe proposes tackling child abuse by killing privacy, strong encryption

Re: How to kill the proposal...

That's a non-starter because obviously the law wouldn't apply to politicians - haven't you watched the news in the last couple of months?

It's time to kick China off social media, says tech governance expert

Re: "If we are banned there, we must ban them here"

I think it's swings and roundabouts.

There is definitely a viewpoint that says our more open and transparent society(*) is a better one to live in, and one of the challenges of living in that society is that we have to learn to cope with misinformation. By this kind of "tit for tat" response we would be lowering ourselves to playing the game by their rules.

* feel free to flame me with examples of where our society isn't sufficiently open and transparent, but you have to accept it's a lot more open than China.

AI-powered browser extension to automatically click away cookie pop-ups now promised

Who could possibly have predicted...

...that forcing every web site to put up a dialog which you need to click "accept" before you can use it would have the "unexpected" effect of training users that whenever a web site puts up a dialog the easiest way to get on with your life is to click "accept" without reading it

Congratulations EU wonks, you just made the problem a whole lot worse.

Amazon’s cloudy desktops creep towards cloudy workstations

Is this an article or an advert?

Just sayin'

File suffixes: Who needs them? Well, this guy did

surprised it took that long. The first thing I do when logging onto any server is check that explorer setting

Amazon, Visa strike global truce on credit card charges

Re: Still Avoiding Them

OK I'l bite - HDDs ?? WTF !?!

I must admit part of me was expecting this climb-down but part of me was expecting amazon to announce their online own payment system.

No, I've not read the screen. Your software must be rubbish

Our accountant complained to me that her PC headset wasn't working properly so I went down to investigate.

as soon as she plugged the headset in (analogue 3.5mm jack plug), a dialog popped up which will be familiar to many dell users asking whether the device plugged in was headphones, microphone or headset. She immediately pressed escape. "Did you read that?" I asked "No" she replied, "Stupid annoying message comes up every time I plug it in"

Happy birthday, Windows Vista: Troubled teen hits 15

Re: Vista Stumbled so 7 could Run

Of course it's true that Windows 7 was based upon vista, but to justify vista's existence on that is to miss the point. Vista was simply not finished, it was not ready for release and should never have been released until it was at a level of stability similar to that achieved with windows 7.

Nothing's working, and I've checked everything, so it must be YOUR fault

Re: Several times...

reminds me of a story from a friend of mine. His dad had some problem with the computer that couldn't be resolved over the phone so friend asked the dad to bring the computer over next time he visited.

Dad turned up carrying just the monitor which he assumed, since that was by far the biggest component, that was where all the gubbins was.

Trojan Source attack: Code that says one thing to humans tells your compiler something very different, warn academics

Re: No examples

Just find paste some arabic/hebrew text and some english text into the same text file with an editor that supports it, then dump it out as hex and you'll see it

Japanese bloke collared after using AI software to uncensor smut and flogging it

What if he had given away the software so others could de-pixelate the images on their own pc. Would either of them have been committing an offence in that case?

Microsoft defends intrusive dialog in Visual Studio Code that asks if you really trust the code you've been working on

Re: Not that macOS is in any sense perfect …

It all depends what you mean by "downloaded" - npm install? git fetch? visual studio template? Almost all the code I write work on is "downloaded" from a git repo even if I wrote it myself

Galaxy quest: Yet another sub-£500 phone comes to trouble mobile big dogs in the form of Realme GT 5G

sub-£500

doesn't anyone else find it amazing that in these days of ever-cheaper electronics, "sub-£500" is even a thing.

I've never even spent £200 on a phone; anything over that is in the "more money than sense" category.